


Stand Your Ground: One Shots and Random Thoughts

by MaryDragon



Series: The Pillars of Creation [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/F, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Gen, One Shot, One Shot Collection, POV First Person, POV Multiple, Spoilers, Unreliable Narrator, table of contents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:19:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 88,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryDragon/pseuds/MaryDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A place for me to collect all the scenes that will not fit into Keep To The Stars and her eventual sequel(s). There will be very spoilery things written here, but I will not post them until the applicable reveal/explanation has appeared in the main work. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. I will include chapter-specific warnings and tags as we go.</p><p>Many of these chapters are perfectly safe. Smut will be marked as such. Explicit rating is for Chapter 3. Everything else is tame.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Table of Contents

**Author's Note:**

> I am not going to try to keep up with the tags on this one, since it's a collection of one-shots. I will, however, try to include the different characters as they appear.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's going to come a time where a couple of two-or-three-chapter shorts end up here, in lieu of getting their own sub story. I figured it would make the most sense to add a chapter on to the very beginning with links to the various prompts, stories, and ficlets so you can find what you want. Also, so you know when something's been added.  
> THERE ARE STORY SPOILERS IN THE INDIVIDUAL DESCRIPTIONS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Subtitled: An Exercise in HTML

Chapter 2: [The Christmas Special](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/12747497) or, the one about Christmas carols and target practice with Hawke & company.

Chapter 3: [Third Night](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/13158460) or, the only smutty thing in here, the chapter of Gwen & Cullen's first night together on the Third Night of Halamshiral.

Chapter 4: [Gwen's Crate](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14094505) or, the collections of links to other people's stories in this universe or in universes similar to this universe or in universes inspired by this universe. Also, all the shit in the Crate.

Chapter 5: [Make Her Proud](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/13899259) or, the one about Hellen dancing with the Empress on the Fifth Night of Halamshiral.  
For the prompt: a moment of triumph or success

Chapter 6: [Starstruck](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14094949) or, the one about Hellen meeting Gwen, that overlaps with the first three chapters of Keep to the Stars.  
For the prompt: a moment that changed them

Chapter 7: [Despair](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14095411) or, the one about Hellen waking up in the cave after the fall of Haven and making her way back to the Inqusiition.  
For the prompt: a moment of vulnerability

Chapter 8: [The Battle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/13184284) or, the one about Gwen and Twitch having a lip sync battle in the Herald's Rest.

Chapter 9: [First Day](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14483752) or, the one with my version of Thedas' New Years Day. 

Chapter 10: [Fools Rush In](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14095845) or, the one when Hellen leaves Gwen behind at the Temple of Mythal.  
For the prompt: a moment they made a mistake

Chapter 11: [The Light When It's Burning Low](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14095663) or, Hellen's revelation at the final battle with Corypheus.  
For the prompt: a moment of loss

Chapter 12: [Favorites](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14610925) or, the one with Hellen and Dorian being dorks in camp.  
For the prompt: a moment with someone they cherish

Chapter 13: [Tell Her](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14611021) or, the one where Hellen has the duel for Josephine's affections in Val Royeaux.  
For the prompt: overcoming an obstacle

Chapter 14: [The After](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14610769) or, when Hellen decides she has to kill Solas  
For the free day in the ten-day prompt series.

Chapter 15: [Time Travelers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/14610058) or, the events of The Dark Future, death of Alexius, and arrival of Miss Gwennie  
For the prompt: a moment in which they consider their future

Chapter 16: [These Eyes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/15088075) or, the one with Neria's backstory

Chapter 17:[ Letters to Mia](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/15243514) or the one [therutherfordwife](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SariTrevelyan/pseuds/therutherfordwife) requested on tumblr

Chapter 18: [To Silence Justice](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/15496180) or the one with Anders' point of view on the battle for Skyhold

Chapter 19: [Escape: Finn Cousland](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/15566527) or the one... actually I think that's a pretty good summary, right there in the title.

Chapter 20: [Escape: Kaiopi Surana (Part I)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/15801754) or the one where we see how Opie gets out of the Circle.

Chapter 21: [Escape: Ophelia Tabris (Part II)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/15802750) or the one where we find out about the Unrest in the Alienage.

Chapter 22: [Escape: Rian Brosca](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/16299977) because that's a pretty good descriptor too.

Chapter 23: [Escape: Edric Cadash](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/16300058), or the one where we get the band back together, man. 

Chapter 24: [Escape: Two Knights Templar](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/17129143) or the one with Aillis and Eamon encountering Opie in the woods.

Chapter 25: [Escape: Two Knights Templar (Part 2)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/17129779) or the one with Opie getting to Val Royeaux with her Templar companions.

Chapter 26: [Escape: Durin Aeducan](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/18238669) or the one where Durin escapes Orzammar and gets set up in Denerim.

Chapter 27: [Dwarf on Her Doorstep](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/18200923): the immediate follow-up to Chapter 26, where Durin meets Solona (again)

Chapter 28: [Blackbird](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/19686739), or the one where Solona is running around Denerim during the Blight

Chapter 29: [The Nightmare](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/24337827), or the one where Ophelia jumps to the absolute worst conclusion possible.

Chapter 30: [Letters to Another Name](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/24337788), or the continuation of Ch 29, in which Opie learns the truth and begins another journey.

Chapter 31: [To Redcliffe](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521874/chapters/15484597), or Hellen's asking Vivienne to chat with Gwen (and why) the morning after the memory.


	2. The Christmas Special

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short Satinalia/Christmas/Winter Holiday one-shot. Set towards the end of pt 2 of Keep to the Stars, featuring Gwen, her adoptive children, and the Kirkwall Crew in the Herald's Rest, in the weeks before Satinalia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know, I'm posting it on Christmas Eve. I'll put up a chapter in Keep to the Stars late tonight, but consider this my Christmas Present to all of you.  
> Thank you for the amazing support I've gotten recently. The community that has sprung up around me is... hrngh. I have no words.  
> All the love.  
> Happy Holidays!  
> ~mary~

“Fuck you, that’s not how it happened,” Garrett laughed, slugging Varric in the shoulder.

“What? I would never bullshit you, Hawke,” the dwarf laughed in return.

“Actually, that is _exactly_ how it happened,” Krem chimed in, coming to the storyteller’s defense once the Tevene had stopped laughing. “Bull will tell you the same story. Adaar just lifted him up and ripped him in half.”

“No!” Hawke laughed. “I believe that! I’ve met Hellen, for fuck’s sake. No, I’m saying there’s no way she gave some flowery bullshit speech while she tore that Magister prick to shreds. Hellen Adaar would have grunted and maybe screamed a little. There was no witty one-liner, Varric, that’s all you.”

“It's what she would have said, if she’d thought about it,” Varric argued, and the room broke into laughter again.

I joined in, leaning back against the bar, a mug of steaming mulled wine clutched between my hands. As the days slid into winter, I was having a harder time staying warm when I ventured out of my tower. I wasn’t sure what they’d done, but my apartment stayed easily ten degrees warmer than any other place in Skyhold. When I’d asked Solas, he had insisted I should look to myself for the answer.

That smug fucking prick.

I hadn’t had nearly as much time as I’d hoped to work with him on my Fade studies, since I spent my days planning for Halamshiral, my nights keeping Cullen on a sleep schedule, and my evenings in the ‘Rest. I had tried skipping out on the tavern once, only to be found, captured, and dragged out of the main hall over Krem’s shoulder. He would have put me down if I had quit laughing, I was told later, but as long as I was giggling like a delighted child, he figured I didn’t really mind so much. As much as I wanted to know what Solas could teach me – and needed to continue to work towards his redemption – it was impossible to resist the allure of the Herald’s Rest.

Varric and Hawke were always there, and nine times out of ten, Merrill and Anders were with them. Not that I got to spend much time conversing with the Kirkwall crew… my honorary children demanded my attention, and I was happy to give it to them.

Using Hawke and Varric’s antics as a cover, I sidled across the room to the long table under the stairs that the Chargers had long since claimed as their own. There was a stool tucked under it, near the end opposite where the Iron Bull generally sat, that Grim had carved my name into one night. It was, quite literally, my seat. I dragged the stool out of its hiding space with a foot and dropped down with a huff, curling myself around the cider mug as if I could absorb the heat. And, actually, I intended to… one sip of hot spiced wine at a time.

“Did you have any Satinalia Songs?” Twitch asked, as the table quickly filled.

“Idiot,” Dalish responded before I could formulate a kinder reply. “No Satina in her world, so no Satinalia.”

“But! …oh.” Twitch sagged a bit dejectedly against the table.

“No,” I said, frowning briefly at Dalish, who colored and mumbled an apology to Twitch. “I don’t know any Satinalia songs. There were many winter holidays in my world, though, and I know about a million Christmas carols.”

“Christmas?” Krem asked, tipping his head. “That doesn’t translate, does it?”

“No,” I said again, shaking my head with a smile. “It was a religious holiday. In my part of the world, it fell three days after Yule, or the winter solstice.”

“Why?” Stitches prompted.

“Did you want to talk about the reasons religions do things?” I asked with a smile.

Dalish snorted. “No.”

“Alright then. Christmas carols it is.”

I wiggled back and forth on my stool until I was as solidly planted on the uneven floor as I could hope to manage, and I did my best Bing Crosby.

_I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know._

_Where the treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow._

_I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, with every Christmas card I write._

_May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white_.

If there was one word to describe the Chargers, it was _tenacious_. They spent an hour, _easily_ , learning the words to White Christmas. I went through my mug of mulled wine and started a second as Krem and Dalish took over, bickering over pronunciation and inflection while I sat on my stool and laughed.

“Typical evening?” Hawke asked, sidling over to crouch beside me. He tipped back to lean against the wall and our heads were nearly level, so great was our height difference.

“Seems like,” I agreed cheerfully.

“What are you teaching them?”

“It was going to be Christmas carols, but it seems like singular _carol_ tonight.”

“So a typical evening in every way,” he laughed.

“Yup!”

“Anders, Merrill, and I were going to go sit up on the battlements and take target practice. Wanna come?”

“Take… target… no. No, I don’t want to know. And, fuck you, its _cold_ up there!”

“We were rather hoping we could talk you into letting us onto your tower. I heard you’ve got a firebowl up there and balefire flasks.”

His eyes were so rounded and innocent – and the expression so completely at odds with the Hawke I knew – that I almost had to acquiesce.

“If you can talk the Chargers into letting me go.”

“Go?” Twitch immediately asked, head whipping around. “Go where?”

“Go light shit on fire,” Hawke answered easily. I winced; it was the exact wrong thing to say.

“Field trip!” Siren called happily.

“Not _everyone_ ,” I sighed. “You won’t all fit.”

“Five Chargers,” Hawke immediately declared.

Krem called dibs, although Dalish and Twitch spoke up first. Stitches declined – “saw enough burns on the Storm Coast, thank you very much” – but Siren wanted to come, and she lifted Grim’s hand to make sure the taciturn man’s grunt was counted.

And so, with mugs of mulled wine and spiced cider and spiked cocoa, we trekked across the crisp courtyard to the tower that housed my apartment. Cole met us at the door, peeking out owlishly at the ten of us filing into my rooms.

“Fun. Fun. Fun. Resolve. Anger. Fun. Fun. Fun. Trouble. Fun.” he said as we passed.

Varric was Anger – still pissed over Bianca, no doubt. I was Resolve. And, surprisingly, Krem was Trouble.

“Trouble?” I asked, feeling an eyebrow quirk up.

“Commander’s going to kick our asses. You know that, right?”

I grinned. “This is all Hawke’s fault.”

“What?” Garrett called down from the second floor, where Cole was letting them onto the roof.

“All right,” Krem cheered, clapping my shoulder on the way by.

My rooms were emptied of blankets, which nearly caught fire when Hawke decided that _one balefire is good, so three is best_. In short order there was a veritable bonfire on my roof. The balefire didn’t put off enough light to interfere with target practice – which turned out to be Varric firing special crossbow bolts that exploded into different colors depending on what sort of magic hit them – or the overwhelming presence of Satina in the eastern sky.

“Getting close,” Krem said, slinging an arm around me to counter my shiver. “Only another couple weeks and she’ll be dead-center in the sky.”

“She seems _huge_ now,” I whispered. This high in the air over Skyhold, with pops of color flashing in the air behind me, it seemed almost as if the second moon were a blimp, nearly close enough to touch.

“I can’t imagine not seeing her,” he replied, shivering from something other than cold.

“It is… odd,” I said, answering the question he didn’t voice. “It is simply bizarre to look around, expecting something you have seen your entirely life, and have it be simply _gone_. Something else entirely in its place. Luna is about the same size as our moon – as it appears from the ground, at least – but she’s the wrong color. The features on her surface are all different.  The moon I grew up with was a luminous white, like the look of snow at night, and we fancied we could see a face in the craters and landscapes she showed. And Satina! I have no frame of reference for Satina. I understand how she founded a winter festival.”

“Got any more songs?” Krem asked when a new round of pops and cheers began on the roof behind where we stood. Varric was firing off to the south, over the empty ice field beneath Skyhold, rather than over the walls or courtyard. Hawke was casting fire, Anders ice, Merrill something green and heinous that I hoped wasn’t toxic, and Dalish – Dalish! – was apparently one hell of an electricity mage. Maybe it was the company, or the location, but she tied her hair back behind her ears and was matching Merrill cast for cast.

“I was thinking _Silent Night_ , but it’s not really appropriate,” I smirked, and Krem laughed.

“If the title is any indicator, no, I would guess not.”

“Permission to be melancholy?”

“Permission granted.”

_I’ll be home for Christmas. You can count on me._

_We’ll have snow and mistletoe and presents under the tree._

_Christmas Eve will find me where the love light gleams_

_I’ll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams._

“Ouch,” Krem breathed when I was done, pulling me closer against him.

“What the Void was that?” Hawke asked, which drew my attention back to those around me. The target practice had stopped, and there were ten pairs of eyes – Coles included – blinking at me in surprise.

“Another Christmas carol,” I shrugged.

“Bullshit,” Garrett grunted. “That was a _dirge_.”

I translated the lyrics for him, and he dropped to the ground, his back to the crenelations making up the short wall of the roof. “What kind of messed up holiday has songs like _that_?”

“There’s others,” I argued, twisting out from under Krem’s arm to drop down and sit next to Hawke.  “Songs about reindeer and mythical creatures and a baby being born who is the savior of all mankind. But my favorites are all sort of sleepy, the kind of thing you listen to over the popping of a fire in the late hours of the evening. Songs about family always meant the most to me, especially after I moved away. I lived hundreds of miles away from my family for nearly as long as I lived with them.”

“So it’s not really a festive holiday,” Hawke insisted, rather flatly.

“No! No! It is, it is! It just… is supposed to be about _family_ and giving of oneself and hope and sacrifice and-“

“And none of those things are jovial,” Anders chimed in, dropping into a crouch in front of us.

“Augh, I’m doing this all wrong.”

“It doesn’t have to be jovial to be filled with joy,” Merrill said, coming to my rescue. She dropped heavily into Hawke’s lap, more mindful of the cold stone beneath us than I had been when I’d taken this seat.

“Yes! See? Merrill understands.”

“That’s not saying much,” Anders confided.

Merrill ignored him, as Hawke snorted and Varric chuckled from over Garrett’s shoulder. “You can find joy in things that are calm, peaceful, reflective… a sunrise or a pool so still it becomes a mirror. Believe it or not, a raucous celebration is not needed to express joy.”

“It’s more fun, though,” Twitch countered.

I looked up and realized they were all surrounding me. “What happened to target practice?”

“You expect us to ignore you when you’re singing dirges?” Dalish scoffed.

“It wasn’t a dirge!”

“Could have fooled me,” Krem laughed.

“You guys suck. Go blow shit up.”

“Oh, ho!” Varric laughed, turning and heading towards where he’d left Bianca leaning against the half-wall on the west side of the tower. “Somebody tell Curly that Perky told us to do it, when he finally comes up here to kill the fun.”

“Figures,” I sighed, rolling my eyes, as the four mages darted back across the roof to start flinging projectiles into the sky.

Krem slid down the wall next to me as Cole appeared on my other side. I tucked my hand in Cole’s as Krem draped an arm around my shoulders. With Satina hovering overhead, and the cackling of the Kirkwall crew paired with the appreciative cheers of my Chargers, it was easy to believe I had made it home.


	3. Third Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Occurs immediately after Chapter 44 of Keep To The Stars
> 
> The rest of the Third Night of Halamshiral.  
> Completely, utterly, unacceptably NSFW  
> There is nothing redeemable here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is nothing but smut. I swear. No plot movement. No character development. Nothing.  
> Well. There's some fluff.  
> But mostly it's smut.  
> If smut is not your thing, move along.

_I was only aware of Cullen; his lips on mine – scalding hot, dry, needy – his hands on my back and hip crushing us together, my hands curled on his shoulder and neck, the long line of his hard body pressed against mine._  
_He stepped away – staggered, really – and bent briefly to sweep an arm under my knees and lift me easily into the air._  
_The dancers parted for us, and Cullen carried me off the floor.  
_ _Hellen was waiting at the top of the stairs, blocking our path. Cullen slowed but did not stop. With a look of intense amusement, Hellen stepped to the side. “See you tomorrow afternoon,” she enunciated clearly._

_*_

Cullen set me down in the courtyard, although I kept a death grip on his hand.  We moved with as much decorum as we could out of the Palace and down to where one of our carriages was waiting. It seems we’d bought Hellen enough time that she had the leisure of having one of the carriages prepared and sent around. Cullen helped me into the conveyance and then followed me up, calling out a quick order to the coachman – Devon, of course – to move.

Cullen sat down with his back to the driver, latched the door tightly shut, and then pulled me into his lap. He unfastened the simple hook-and-loop holding my mask on, tossed it onto the seat neither of us were occupying, and then dragged my mouth down to meet his.

My hands were in his hair, my lips were pressed to his, my knees came to rest on either side of his hips, and his hands were _everywhere_.  His palms ran down my thighs to my knees, swept back to my hips, circled my waist, ran up my ribs to my shoulders, followed my neckline down to trace out the sword of mercy on my pendant…

“Wait,” I gasped, pulled back.

Cullen immediately froze.

“It's… it's… too much, too fast, it's been too long it's-“

“Gwen,” he breathed my name, and the calming effect it had on me was almost _shameful_. “Gwen, love, it’s okay. Whatever you want, we don’t have to-“

“No!” I pressed a hand to his mouth, cutting off the thought before he could finish expressing it. “No, it’s not _that_ it's… Maker, Cullen I was married. You get _used to_ … well… and then, since then, it’s been so long that I…”

“What are you trying to tell me, Gwen?” his hands were gently resting on my shoulders. I pressed both hands over his chest.

“You have to go _slow_ ,” I managed. “I’m hypersensitive, I’m already so keyed up that… _Maker_ you could probably get me to come just by breathing on me right.”

His face split into a grin and he shook lightly with laughter. “That’s not a bad thing.”

“No, I know. I want this. _Maker_ do I want this. But I want to _remember_ this. I don’t want it all to go by in a blur.”

Cullen nodded, and I leaned in to kiss him again. It was gentler this time – slower, warmer – but every bit as needy. His tongue flashed out to brush across my lips and I couldn’t help but hum in the back of my throat.

“Hellen did give us until tomorrow _afternoon_ ,” Cullen reminded me. My heart fluttered. “I’ve long since learned how to go without sleep.”

I didn’t get a chance to answer as Devon called out for the horses to stop and then Malcolm was popping open the door. I shifted across the carriage to the opposite side before anyone could see in, and Cullen took my hand as he descended, leading me out behind him.

Knowledge of _exactly_ what we were doing back so early was scrawled across the face of everyone I came across. I could see Cullen start to burn with embarrassment.

“Just as well they all know,” I told him as he opened the door to the hallway for the wing our apartments were on. His hand was on the small of my back as he gently guided me through. “That will keep any of them from worrying when they hear me screaming your name later.”

“Maker, woman,” he breathed, stumbling a bit as he pulled the door closed and turned to follow me. “Is this in retribution for using us as a diversion? I’ll die a happy man, but you’ll still kill me.”

I leaned against the doorframe as he produced the key and unlocked his room. I let him go in ahead of me – he’d shuttered all the windows and secured the room, but still he checked everywhere before determining it was safe for me to enter – and then slid through when he gestured the all-clear. I shut the door, leaning against it, and slid the bolt home behind my back as Cullen stalked back across the room towards me. "No Chargers tonight?"

He shook his head,  _no_. "Nobody wanted to risk being in here when I brought you home."

He placed his hands on the door on either side of my head and leaned in. I took the opportunity to start on the buttons of his coat. His breath was running ragged again, moreso when I slipped my hands between his collar and the skin of his neck.

“I hadn’t yet considered retribution,” I admitted, loosening his coat. His skin was almost painfully hot against my icy fingertips. “I'm too caught up in the moment to really care how we got here.”

He was staring at me, as if finally coming to accept that we were really alone, and this was really going to happen. I watched the flicker of emotions play across his face as I met his eyes and continued unbuttoning his coat. I reached the bottom button and followed the hem around, sliding my thumbs under the band of his pants and tracing around his waist.

“Of all the things I love about you,” he said absently, “I am most mesmerized by your mouth.”

He was going somewhere with that. I could almost hear the second line forming in his throat, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

“You haven’t even begun to comprehend what this mouth is going to do for you.”

He made this _sound_ , groaning growl of need that raised the hairs on my neck and sent goosebumps down my spine. I ran my hands back to his shoulders and tugged lightly. He dropped his arms so I could push his coat off. The green material slumped to the floor and then his arms were around me again.

We were nose-and-nose as he walked me across the floor, chests pressed together and legs moving in sync. His calves hit an armchair in the sitting room and he spun us around, depositing me into the cushion and sinking to his knees in front of me.

“Were these Leliana’s idea?” he asked, dragging my skirt up to expose the knee-high boots. “I think they must be. I’ve seen your taste in footwear and it is far more reasonable.”

“If you approve, I could see about acquiring less-reasonable-footwear.”

He started unlacing the boots with care, clearly not wanting to damage the expensive leather-and-lace. “Right now I want _no_ footwear, thank you.”

He leaned forward and pressed his lips to the inside of my knee as the boot came loose, and traced the skin down as it was exposed. My hands gripped the arms of the chair as I fought to stay still.

He tipped his face and kissed the opposite knee as he started work on the other boot. My freed foot was on his thigh, pressing against him frantically as I barely managed not to squirm under his ministrations.

“Ticklish?” he asked as the other boot came free.

I shook my head. “Not there, at least. Just… very sensitive. Everything you do… it feels like it’s new, like I’ve never been touched in my life.”

He set my shoes to the side and leaned back to sit on his heels. He laid his hands gently on my knees. “Are you alright?”

I nodded my head. “I am. I really, _really_ am.” I pulled myself forward in the chair so I was perched on the very edge of the seat. “I just… think I need to treat this like _my first time_ and accept that I don’t know my limits anymore. I want very badly to just jump you, but I think… I think I was right in the carriage.”

“Slow,” Cullen recalled.

I nodded. “I need to take that to heart more than you,” I added.

“And you think I've had a tryst more recently than you?” he asked archly.

I made a show of shrugging. “I wasn’t paying anywhere near as much attention to your habits as I should have been.”

“Not since Kirkwall,” he assured me softly. “Never with any frequency. And never with anyone I loved. ”

“So this is rain after a drought for us both.”

He smiled again, and leaned forward. I shifted to allow him between my knees. He reached behind me to wrap his hands around my hips and pull me against him, and as I wrapped my legs around his waist, he stood and lifted me easily into the air. I threaded my hands around his neck and tried to relax.

He set me back on my feet at the side of his bed - _our_ bed – and ran his hands up my back to my neck. I turned and lifted my hair so he could find the narrow row of buttons that ran down my back and free me from the velvet embrace of my green dress. It slipped down my shoulders to lay in a heap on the floor. I stepped out of it, and turned back around to face Cullen.

He was standing, carefully impassive, with his hands down at his sides... waiting for me to proceed.

I could not believe how careful he was being, how considerate of my past and my feelings, when clearly he wanted this just as badly as I did. I closed the distance between us and unlaced his shirt. He reached over one shoulder to grab a fist full of material and pulled the shirt off, tossing it lightly to the side.

His torso was liberally crossed with scars, of varying size and severity. The scar on his face was only the most noticeable; it had dozens of brethren beneath Cullen’s clothes. I put my hands on his shoulders and traced the lines his chest down to the button of his pants, and his arms came around me as I slid my fingers beneath the waistband to loosen them. I realized he still had his boots on and I stepped backwards, my own hands moving to the laces of my shift as he bent slightly to tug off his boots.

His eyes never strayed from my face.

His socks were peeled off and then my hands were at his waist again, slipping his hips free of the leather of his pants, and taking his hand to tug him gently towards the side of the bed.

He stepped out of the last of his clothing, and I reached up with both hands to push my shift off my shoulders. It slithered down to puddle at the floor, and Cullen’s breath caught.

He hadn’t seen it – Dorian and Hellen had, of course, and so had Josephine and Leliana and probably Vivienne. I couldn’t keep track anymore; it hadn’t mattered to me, and it hadn’t mattered to any of them. In a world of Blights and demons and magical warfare, scars were commonplace; I'd never even had it brought up in conversation in the bath. But _Cullen_ hadn’t seen it, and it meant something completely different between us. I put my hands on my hips and stood under Cullen’s gaze, waiting for him to come to grips with the jagged scar across my abdomen.

It started just under my ribs on the left side and ran diagonally down to disappear in my groin, a rough ridge of scar tissue caused by the metal of my car as it crumpled around me all those years ago. There were other scars around it; small spots that had once been staples and stitches, thin precise lines from a later surgery involving cameras and biopsy probes and a terrible false alarm.

His eyes rose back up to meet mine, and his hands pulled mine from my hips and threaded our fingers together.

“I survived,” I told him, as he lifted my hands to his mouth to kiss his way across my knuckles. “I survived everything so that I could come here. So I could _be_ here. This is where I am meant to be.”

He dropped my hands and cupped my face, drawing our lips together. I wrapped my arms around him, pulling our skin into contact for the first time.

He was a pillar of flame. My skin felt sunburned as it pressed against his, hot and dry and so alive it nearly hurt. His hands descended from my face to rove across my back and down, as if determined not to leave any inch of skin untouched.

I pulled him with me as a I stepped back, my calves pressed against the mattress, and he pivoted on his heel. I spun gently around so I was facing the bed as he slowed pitched backwards onto the mattress, pulling me down onto him.

I knew he had plans. I knew he had a different idea of _slow_ than I did, knew that all my bravado about _what my mouth could do_ had likely given him a very solid idea of how he wanted the night to progress. With him on his back below me, however, the clothing finally gone from between us, I didn’t stop to consider my options. I tilted my hips forward, pulled our bodies into alignment, and then pitched backward so the scalding heat of his erection slid into me.

As his eyes flew wide and he gasped, I kept leaning back until I was sitting on my heels, my knees pressed to either side of his ribs, and I reached up to ghost my fingers over my hair.

“Maker’s breath, Gwen, _that_ is your idea of slow?”

My own heart rate was stuttering, my pulse fluttering in my throat, as I casually began sliding the pins out of my hair and letting it fall, one lock at a time, to frame my face and shoulders.

Cullen’s disbelief slowly melted into fascination as I worked, and his hands followed the curve of my knee up my thighs to creep up my scarred abdomen and then dance across the skin of my breasts. I leaned forward into the touch, changing the angle of our connection and causing us both to gasp as I pressed my hips against his.

Cullen sat up, dragging another gasp from me, and lifted my hair out of the way, exposing my neck to his lips. He worked his way from ear to collarbone, his hands gently mapping out the skin of my breasts, letting my little gasps and twitches as his teeth scraped my collarbone or his thumb grazed a nipple gradually work me into a frenzy.

I pulled loose the last pin and shook my hair our, threading my fingers through Cullen’s hair. He returned the favor, his right hand splayed across my back and his left tangled in my hair as he lifted me off his lap and tilted me to land gently on my back beneath him.

“Gwen,” he breathed, a plea for consent in the word, pulling away just far enough to give his lips room to speak. He shifted so our noses were even again, laying his forehead against mine, and it was all I could do not to take his mouth with my own. 

I answered physically rather than verbally, nodding as I  tilted my hips and watching his eyes flutter, briefly shut.

He started to move, then, finally taking over the lead. He was moving so slow, _Maker_ so slow, but still I was clinging to him within moments, breathless and already hovering near the edge.

“Gwendolyn Rhiannon Murray,” he whispered my name, reverently, into the skin of my neck, before carefully enunciating, in flawed but perfectly understandable English, "Gwen, _I love you_."

It was too much, it was all _too much_ and what little control I had left splintered. I cried out, digging my nails into his shoulders as my ankles locked around his hips and stars erupted into my vision, a trillion swirling pinpoints of light as I came undone in his arms.

He held me as I came down, pressing me against his chest like I was unspeakably precious, priceless.

"How-" I gasped. "When?  _Who_?"

"Ask me another time," he answered, laughing, and shook his head as I spluttered in disbelief. He cut off my questions with a kiss and then started moving again, a slow velvet give and take that rolled my eyes back in their sockets and curled my toes.

“Gwen,” he breathed, and just the _memory_ of the last time he’d said my name catapulted me back into the heavens. I sobbed his name as I came, harder than before, clinging to his shoulders and not caring if every person in Halamshiral heard me.

When I’d recovered this time, I pushed up with one foot and forced us into a roll, landing atop Cullen as he hissed in a breath. I lifted one of his hands to cup my breast and dragged the other to cup my face and then encouraged him to tangle his fingers in my hair. I watched his head tip back as I started to grind my hips into his, and his eyes slowly slid shut as he fought to keep his breath. I kept going until he moaned, hands tightening convulsively against me.

“You have me figured out,” I told him in a voice suddenly gone husky. “Teach me what you like.”

His eyes snapped open. “Gwen-“

“Show me how you want it, Cullen. Show me what you need.”

He hesitated again, torn, and I dropped my hands behind me to rest on the inside of his thigh, slowly scraping my fingernails up from his knee. He responded with this incredibly sexy outcry, a mix of surprise and desire and pleasure all bound up and forced out of his throat. Then I was upended, thrown backwards into the pillows at the head of the bed so I was sitting slightly up, and then Cullen’s head was between my thighs and the world disappeared. My eyes were clamped shut and my head slung back to bang against the headboard as his nose pressed into my clit and his tongue curled into me.

I was coming again, pleaded with him to _don’t stop Maker don’t stop Cullen please_ as the world flared white hot behind my eyelids.

He pulled away and I cried out again, reaching for him as his body glided up mine. His mouth was in the hollow my neck, his teeth scraping my collarbone as they traveled to my shoulder and then down, marking my pale skin as he suddenly was inside me again, hips grinding against mine. He lifted my right knee with his left arm while my left leg stayed pinned against his and there was something about the angle of his entry that ripped the first scream from my throat.

His name, all I could pronounce was his name; my vocabulary shrank to one word as I climaxed over and over, chaining them together until everything else disappeared. There was nothing in the world except his body against mine, the force of his thrusts jarring my hips and my fingertips digging trenches across his back.

His voice joined mine – my name, and then another wordless expression of _need_ – and buried himself deep, shuddering as he finally found release. He tipped slightly to the side as he collapsed, so that he was propped up in the pillows to my side rather than leaving all his weight on me. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded being crushed beneath him. I felt like I was floating, like I needed his shoulders to pin me to the earth so I didn’t drift away.

“That was not… slow…” he informed me once he had some breath. I laughed, causing us both to gasp a little as the movement shifted him within me.

“It started slow,” I countered.

“Was that…” he tried, shook his head, started again. “Are you…”

“Sated? Satisfied? Currently completely incapable of moving my legs? Yes. You?”

“Same,” he laughed, tucking an arm under me and rolling us carefully so we didn’t slide apart. We came to rest facing each other, my leg still thrown over his hip, my hands in his hair and his palms against my back as his mouth found mine.

“I love you,” I breathed when we split apart for air.

“I love you,” he responded.

We laid like that for a minor eternity, as our pulses returned to normal and feeling returned to my feet. Eventually he pulled away, sliding free as I could not help but voice a little whine of complaint.

With an impossibly smug grin, he slid off the bed and padded from the room. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I didn't need the light, but he knelt by the hearth to stir up the fire, tossing on several more logs before standing and moving to the sideboard. He poured two glasses of wine and set them on the floor by one of the chairs. I rolled over to watch him work.

“What are you up to?”

He turned to look at me and seemed stunned. I was on my side, and painfully aware of the way my waist dipped down between the swell of my hips and bust. I tilted my head to watch him as he walked slowly back to the bed. The fire behind him lit up his hair and cast his face into shadow; I was being stalked by a golden god. I felt the warmth start to build in my abdomen again.

He leaned down and quickly rolled me up in the coverlet as I squeaked in surprise. “I had a plan,” he told me as he lifted me off the bed, blankets and all. “I am known for my plans.”

“Yeah?” I laughed happily. “And what was this plan?”

“I planned to bring you here,” he said evenly, sounding for all the world just like he did when he outlined a proposal at the war table in Skyhold, “lay you out in front of the fire, so you might maybe be warm for once, and taste every inch of your skin until you begged for me to make love to you.”

My breath caught in my throat. My heart was pounding in my chest, raging against my ribs as if it were captive in a cage. “It's… it was a good plan. I almost regret the way the night went, if it upset such a carefully crafted scheme.”

“Oh, no,” Cullen corrected me. “There is nothing stopping me from going forward with this plan.”

“No?” I managed.

Cullen shook his head as he set me down beside the fire, carefully unwrapping me from the blankets and handing me a glass of wine before taking my free hand and drawing it to his mouth.

He traced every line of my fingers with his lips, nipping at my fingertips gently, and eventually working down to the base of my thumb, which he carefully sucked on until I was arching up out of the blankets, struggling to breath. He pulled away just enough for me to lay back down, and then pressed the inside of my wrist to his mouth.

“Hellen said tomorrow _afternoon_ ,” he reminded me. “And I learned long ago how to forego sleep. The rest of the Inquisition won’t return until some time past midnight. It would be horribly inconsiderate of us to wake them with your calling my name once they were back. And I promise you, Gwen… you _are_ going to be screaming my name again.”


	4. Gwen's Crate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gwen's running list of things she's found in the crate in her room in Skyhold. All objects suspected of being of offworlder origin are deposited there for her inspection.

Journals, 3: handwritten by Michael "Pennants" Dupree (deceased)  
1\. Recreated sheet music  
2\. Complete instructions on piano construction (extensive)(give to Dagna!)  
3\. Personal journal (gifted separately by Celene)(stick it in the crate with the rest of it) 

Leather messenger bag, likely Italian  
Belonging to Michael Dupree: wallet, car keys, tool kit, pens, blank journal, various paper and detritus of modern life (receipts, etc)

Rucksack, Thedosian, sewn closed and seams sealed with wax  
Dagna claims it Fereldan  
Manner of sealing and location of discovery (with Michael's bag) makes it highly suspect  
As yet unopened

Cell phones:   
Mine   
Jacquelyn Miller  
Michael Dupree  
Maryam (currently on charger)  
Debbie (in charger queue, see below)  
Twitch (found in alley in Denerim)

Scarf, plaid: coral and brown print, wool. Evidence of machining. 

Shoes: Women's size 9, black, dance (?); not tap, not ballet - maybe Jazz?  
Suede ball, scuffed heels (left more than right)

Jewelry set: White gold and pearl, necklace and earings. Ornate - lily pattern; matched set  
Engraved: "mon amour pour toi est éternel"  
Wrapped with note from merchant who turned it over (sold?) to Inquisition stating bought off "bedraggled stranger"

Sketchbook: drawings within are pencil shadings of skyscrapers (!!)  
Most drawings unfinished

Binder: Three-ring, with plastic page protectors; green, cutesy pictures of veggies  
both hand-written and printed recipes, in both English and (probably) French. notations in both languages and Common.   
Inside cover has addresses in Houston and Paris  
Notation in Common: [Tempie Smith, the Three Horsehoes, Minanter Hollow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6532927/chapters/14945524)  
Sidenote: everything in this looks tasty as fuck. _comfort food!_  Sera doesn't know what chicken and dumplings are - MUST FIX THIS

Dog tags: laser-etched, set of two; bullet casing on chain  
Gave bullet to Dagna for research; was found to be inert and hollow, with a rolled-up photo of a child and her parents inside.  
Inscription: [SHEPARD, ERIS J](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3811525/chapters/8494033)  5923-AC-2826  0+  RH+  CMDR  N7  
Back of one tag reads N7  
Back of other tag is engraved with a  _fucking space ship_ and the words NORMANDY SR2  
Sidenote: I don't even know how to wrap my head around this one. I'm going to assume it's a gag gift somebody had made.

Red leather purse: contains a cell phone (in queue for charger), casino coupons, leather wallet, pens, assorted cosmetics, various paper and detritus of modern life (receipts, etc)  
Sidenote: ID and other information is from [Las Vegas, Nevada](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6663049/chapters/15238546). No indication of travel plans - indication Nevada was hit?

Book: Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Slightly singed. Inscription on front cover mostly illegible. Note clipped to dust jacket indicates it was found [in ruins of Haven](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6727084/chapters/15378019).

Necklace: twine and metal. Appears to be cylinder from a lock; Schlage? Alloy not currently found on Thedas.  
Sold to Inquisition agents by a Chasind merchant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Links forthcoming! Just wanted to get the list started before I took off on vacation.


	5. Make Her Proud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a 10-Days-of-Prompts challenge in my Artist's Group, this was day 2: A Moment of Triumph or Success.
> 
> Hellen's POV (as all ten prompts were). This one-shot takes place during night 5 of Halamshiral, or Chapter 46 of Keep to the Stars.

I was furious as I stormed back into the ballroom.

I won’t say _enraged_ , because that bears a different connotation for me. I was not in a rage. I was not out of my mind with anger. I was not channeling the part of my soul that was primal, that was uncontrollable, that was (if you believed Bull and the stories) draconic in essence.

No, I was just pissed.

It was enough.

I saw Florianne already making her move as I entered. I didn’t have time for thought, for consideration, for contemplation, for _action_. “Vivienne!” I called, instead, and the Enchanter froze Florianne in place, just as she had that obnoxious Marquis at her salon the day we’d met.

Celene whirled around, shocked, and came face-to-face with her cousin, dagger drawn, prepared to _quite literally_ stab her in the back.

If only all of my judgments could be so cut and dry.

“Grand Duchess Florianne,” I said, pitching my voice so it reverberated in the hall. It was almost as if the fucking Orlesians had built this place to channel a kossith’s voice. “You stand accused of co-conspiracy, of an attempt on the life of Empress Celene Valmont, and of being in league with Corypheus and thus complicit in the death of Divine Justinia and the three hundred forty seven others known to have died in the Conclave. How do you plead?”

I knew damn well she couldn’t respond; Vivienne had frozen her solid. Her eyes were free, darting back and forth in what could have been panic or anger. Vivienne’s hand began to lift, to free the Duchess’ mouth to answer, when the Empress spoke.

“Lady Florianne pleads guilty,” Celene announced softly, although I had no doubt it was heard in every corner of the room. So much for the kossith-inspired acoustics theory.

“As Inquisitor, I accept your plea,” I pronounced. “Your penalty is death. May the Maker grant mercy, for you shall find none here.” My left arm was still crackling with power from the rift in the garden, and the energy almost cast itself into her chest. I was nearly as satisfied with the way the rift pulled her inside out as I was when I’d done it to Gaspard… almost.

Gaspard, I would like to bring back and kill another three or four times. If I’d left a body, Dorian could have helped me with that.

“Thank you, your Radiance,” I told Celene in the silence following the implosion of Florianne. “I appreciate the opportunity to remove another of Corypheus’ allies from this war.”

“We are pleased the attempt on our person could create such an opportunity for the Inquisition,” Celene replied primly, and I remembered at the last minute not to grin. Josephine was off to my left, just within my peripheral vision. She had spent every waking minute we were together in Skyhold preparing me for this role, and I would rather see Gwen shot again than disappoint her. Granted, Gwen getting shot had resulted in me destroying a large amount of architecture in the Winter Palace, and that had, in turn, disappointed Josephine a bit. It was a narrow line I walked.

So instead of doing something human and unforgivable, I instead crossed the ballroom to ascend the stairs and come to a stop beside Celene, so that our conversation might not be overheard and the festivities could be renewed. It was apparently the right move, as I caught Josephine’s eye and she was positively beaming at me.

Celene and I had much to discuss, but rather than admit in the middle of the Ball how I had been spending my time for the last four nights (breaking and entering, mostly), the Empress kindly invited me to dinner the following night. Rather than accept outright, I asked her to please send a dignitary to my Ambassador, as she was in charge of all my diplomatic arrangements, and as much as anyone would understand my time being claimed by the Empress, it was best to be forthcoming with any cancellations the invitation might cause.

Celene smiled behind her hand as it fluttered up to ostensibly caress and draw attention to her mask. It was a common gesture in Orlesians, and one that I had seen used a thousand times to cover up words or expressions. I smiled with only my eyes, as Josie had taught me, and was confident the Empress and I understood each other. One of her Ladies in Waiting was dispatched to make preparations with Josephine, and then Celene turned and caught my elbow.

“I find,” she said, dropping both her voice and the royal affectation of _we_ , “that I suddenly feel a lightness I have been missing for years. Would you care to dance, Inquisitor?”

I found that Celene only referred to herself in the singular when she was alone, or comfortable in the company she kept, and to hear it here, on the ballroom floor, was as much as a compliment as the offer itself.

“I would be delighted, your Radiance,” I replied, and offered her my arm.

The idea of dancing with the Empress had entered into no one’s minds when we were prepping for the ball. Celene Valmont had not danced in recent memory and was assumed to have given the activity up in favor of watching, as was common with older monarchs and those deeply entrenched in The Game. The floor cleared with alacrity as we reached it, and I was left at a loss. Did I lead? Did I follow? Which statement was the better one to make?

Following was the safer bet, and I arranged myself accordingly. With a faint smile from the Empress, we were off.

I suck at following. It is just not something I do. I had not followed since Josephine had taught me the basics, months ago, and had instead practiced until I could lead any dance in my sleep. …and with Wisdom to guide me, that probably wasn’t an exaggeration. The decision to follow forced me to put far more attention into my steps and forms than leading might.

Again, this was noticed. I was not a follower, not nearly as graceful in the following role, but I did it for Celene, to the best of my ability.

I thought ahead through the steps and realized there was a place some two movements ahead that would be awkward to complete with our height difference, and made a bold decision. When we arrived at the change in steps, I slid my hand up and over, and prayed Celene would go along.

She did. For the space of twelve measures, I led the Empress through the dance. The hall erupted in whispers, but I could not waste the time to suss out the mood. When we reached the end of that movement, I dropped back into a following stance, and gave Celene once more the lead.

“How apropos,” Celene murmured, the first we had spoken since taking the floor. “You must divulge who has so well versed you in The Game, Inquisitor.”

“I can take no credit but for what Josephine Montilyet passes along, your Radiance,” I answered softly. Making my voice low was a far harder task than raising it, and I reminded myself of the precise number of hours I had remaining in this fucking ball.

“How interesting,” Celene replied in the same low tones. “And to think all information had pointed at Sister Leliana.”

“It is not unlike Sister Leliana to divert attention from someone she wishes to protect, your Radiance.”

Celene allowed herself a tiny smile, and I internally sighed with relief as the dance ended. “A warning best heeded. It has been a privilege, Inquisitor.”

I bowed my response. “The honor was mine, your Radiance.”

We parted on the floor, turning to depart in opposite directions; she, towards her own Palace, and me towards my Inquisition and what was previously Gaspard’s manse. Josephine was standing at the top of the stairs, where the banister met an ornate pillar. Our eyes met as I began to ascend from the floor, and she, without subterfuge or veiled intent, smiled at me.

I felt an unfamiliar thrill of triumph. _Josephine was proud of me_.

All of the rest of this bullshit was finally worthwhile.


	6. Starstruck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Hellen  
> From a series of prompts. This one was: A Moment That Changed Them  
> *  
> Overlaps with Keep to the Stars, Part 1, Chapter 3: In The Chantry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somebody stop me or I'll post all of these prompts tonight.

“I thought you said I had done it,” I grunted, glaring at the swirling mass of clouds in the sky.

“You have,” Cassandra shot back, more than a little defensive. “You closed the Breach. You can no longer look up and see into the Fade, the magical energies have-“

“It’s not _closed_ ,” I countered, waving my arms at the _alleged former Breach_. “It’s _patched_. You could have stitched a piece of nugskin on a dragonscale coat and have it be a more convincing repair.”

“Solas agreed, that the Breach-“

“Just who the fuck is Solas to know? Did anybody ever-“

“What the-“

We both turned, our typical spat interrupted by something moving – large and swift – in our peripheral vision. We’d spent enough time in Haven to be accustomed to movement patterns, and _large and swift_ was never something you saw anywhere near the Chantry.

It was the Iron Bull, the Ben’Hassrath I’d recruited just a few weeks past in the Storm Coast, which explained the _large_ bit. He had something draped over his shoulder, and after a moment I realized it was a person, their face obscured by one of the water skins from the Chantry, the ones by the door for suffering pilgrims when they arrived.

Neither of us needed to see her face to know who Bull was hauling out of Haven as fast as his feet could carry him. Her _shoes_ screamed her identity at a volume most voices couldn’t attain.

“She’s awake?” Cassandra breathed.

“And she’s _escaping_?” I added. For one long moment, we both stared at Bull as he quickly disappeared down the hill. “With _Bull_?”

Her face suddenly came into view, grimacing as she spit out the water on the ground. She shuddered and took another long pull from the water skin, and I laughed in spite of myself.

“Oh, I know how that feels. Furry teeth after a few days asleep. Yuck.”

“Commiserate with her later, Adaar, the Qunari spy is-“

“Yeah, yeah, let’s go fuck him up,” I agreed, and we sent off after him. “He can’t get far, Cullen’s down by the gate to keep the party under control.”

We rounded the corner by the quartermaster and could see Bull setting her down next to Cullen. She was pale – paler than she had been when she’d just fucking _appeared_ in Redcliffe – and decided unsteady on her feet. She put one hand to her head as she wobbled, and I saw she had her other hand quite firmly latched onto Bull’s shoulder harness. There was something about that contact that utterly changed the scene in my mind.

She was willingly touching a Qunari.

I had played through a hundred scenarios in my head as I carried her back to Haven. She would be disgusted, shocked, frightened… every reaction I had ever gotten from a human, I had imagined on her face as I watched her sleep.

It had never occurred to me that she was a Viddathari.

It had never occurred to me that she was a spy, like Bull.

She was rattling something off as Cassandra and I slowed to better take in the scene. She was clearly too ill to be moved, and Bull didn’t seem to be trying to convince Cullen to let them leave. He was listening carefully to her every word, jaw tight with what I knew, _knew_ , to be thinly controlled rage.

Bull and I were alike in a lot of ways. I had a better handle on the rage than he did, but he used it better when it came out. He _channeled_ it. I laid things to waste.

She noticed us, then, flickering a glance over Cassandra with a brief flash of – fear? respect? – before giving me a full once over and then meeting my eyes with an unwavering gaze. I slowed to a stop and saw far more in her eyes than I had imagined in the four days since she’d tumbled unconscious to my feet. Surprisingly, I saw _pity_ , mingled with respect and definite recognition.

Who the fuck was this chick?

“My lady Adaar,” she said politely, in flawless Qunlat, and I felt truly starstruck. _She knew my name_. Had Bull told her my name? “My lady Pentaghast,” she directed at Cassandra. _Nope_ , I thought, Bull would have called her The Seeker or just Cassandra. “Thank you for sparing my life. I wish I had awoken earlier, so I could have given you more time to act.”

Nothing about this made sense. She had fallen out of a portal that didn’t make sense, of course. The glimpse I had of that strange world, the bizarre shapes of metal and thickly whitewashed walls, made me believe this oddly-dressed woman who knew my name on sight, when most of the world did not even know my _race_ , was definitely from the future. And she was _polite_.

“It was my pleasure,” I replied, at a loss for any other reply. “You are of the Qun?” She wasn’t, but I had to ask.

She shook her head emphatically and seemed to immediately regret it. She’d taken nasty head wound and even if she was awake, she definitely shouldn’t be out running around.

“Should you be up?” I asked, years of healing mercenaries coloring my reactions.

She smiled, and the world moved.

She was relieved, pleased I was concerned for her welfare, and I couldn’t even imagine what else crossed her face. But such a face… she was expressive in a way I had never seen before, as if she was the first color I had seen in a world of black and white. And her _teeth_. They were perfect pearls, unstained and precisely positioned, not a single one missing or chipped or crooked or anything but flawless, sparkling white. Even after days of honeyed tea dribbled past her lips by Solas, they were unstained.

She was impossible.

“Honestly, no,” she answered, and I could hear the change in her tone. “I was down for too long, I am up and running too fast. I’m going to burn through my stamina very quickly. But we’re all in danger. Did you hear what Bull told Cullen?”

There was too much in that statement for me to run through, so I broke it down to the critical component: danger. I turned to Cullen, and he immediately related the tale – with a healthy dose of skepticism.

“If she’s a spy for this _Corypheus_ , she would _of course_ know his marching plans. He lets her ruin his surprise attack and gain your trust so he can crush you later, with less chance of failure.”

“Valid point,” Cassandra grunted.

“We use the information to survive the surprise attack, then,” I countered, and was met with nods all around. “Send Josie to the Chantry and get confirmation from Roderick. Bull, call up the Chargers and get the evacuation started. At least get people moving, and we can haul them to the Chantry once we’ve talked to Roderick. And who is Cole?”

I turned to find her watching our mouths as we spoke, and recognized it as someone trying desperately to understand a language she had never heard before. “Who is Cole?” I repeated, in the language I knew she would understand.

“A huge force approaches! The bulk over the mountain!” A guard called from the top of the gates, relaying a message from a scout behind the doors.

“Bearing what banner?” Josephine called back.

“None.”

“None?” she asked Cullen, startled.

“Cole is coming to the door, you can trust him,” the newcomer, still clinging to Bull like a fresh lamb, told me. I met her eyes again and saw _fear_ there. She wore everything upon her face, every emotion as it passed her mind flickered across her features; it was fascinating to watch. She was afraid, desperate, worried, _determined_. And there was not an ounce of subterfuge in her.

I would bet my life on it. I opened my mouth to tell her as much when there came a pounding on the door.

“You have to let me in,” a weak voice said, and I charged off to the gates.

It was Cole – because of course it was – and then everything was tumbling out of control. Samson standing with the Elder One – Corypheus, she had said – and a veritable horde of red Templars descending from the mountains.

“Bull!” I heard her voice, pitched to carry, and I spun, intrigued by the way she was already so familiar with us all. “Clear the men away from the trebuchet after it fires!”

“What? Why?” Bull called back.

“The dragon will target it!”

The change in Bull’s expression did her no favors. She knew – _knew_ – exactly how to win over the mercenary, and Cullen saw it. Josephine was slinging the woman’s arm around her neck and hauling her towards the Chantry as I approached Cullen for a plan.

It was chaos, then, the true chaos of open warfare. Skirmishes in the woods are one thing. Running into a couple darkspawn here or there along a stretch of abandoned coastline is to be expected. But this was _war_ , and there is no way to describe it if you’ve never lived it.

In the end, we were all in the Chantry, Roderick bleeding out after taking a sword meant for a mage – would wonders never cease – and my only option became clear. I was going to stay behind, now that the Breach was "closed" and I was arguably expendable. The Elder One wanted me, and I could buy the time that would save the life of everyone else in Haven.

I was never one for a martyr complex, but it explained the pity I had seen in her eyes.

As if summoned, she appeared from somewhere back in the Chantry, immediately noticeable in her bizarre clothing, although now with a pack of bandages slung over her shoulder, moving with the infirmary staff as if she belonged there.

I had to ask, had to know if this was both hello and goodbye, if she was going to take over my fledgling Inquisition and carry it past this defeat.

“Well?” I asked instead.

“You have a plan?” she asked, with an emphasis that told me she already knew the answer. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

“Roderick is going to lead everyone out, and I am going to…” I almost said _die_ but that would ruin what I was trying to ask. “…I’m going to create a distraction.”

She smiled again, and I had to fight against being dazzled. Her teeth were flat, the weaponless tools of humans; every other carnivore had a mouthful of pointed teeth, and human smiles wouldn't ever stop weirding me out. “Find a way,” she said, and it was so close to what Cullen had just said…

“That’s it?” I demanded. “Bull told me you could see the future, and that’s all you’re going to say?”

“What happens if I tell you, and my telling you changes the way you act or the decisions you make, and thus alters the future? You know the future is alterable – it is already different from what you saw in the hell that was Alexius’ intention.”

She was not in that _hell_ , as she called it; I would have seen her there. And there was no way Bull had told her what I’d seen in that future; he barely knew it himself. Everything seemed to tumble into place: she had seen something, something terrible, in the far future, and she had come back to fix it. Perhaps the ultimate end of the timeline Alexius tried to create; I didn’t know. It was possible I would _never_ know. And she couldn’t tell me. It was too much – _danger, remember?_ – and I shuddered, once, away from the idea of what she could have seen to cause her to come _here, now_. “Alright, I can concede your point.”

That smile again. _Damn_ that smile. “Be true to yourself, my lady. That’s all any of us can hope for.”

The pity was gone. She was trying to reassure me, with her ready smile and her steady gaze, and _Void take me_ if it didn’t work. There was no sorrow, no reticence, no grim resolve. There was no _death_ in her eyes, no sign that she didn’t intend to see me again. This woman wasn’t sending me off to die – she was sending me off to _win_.

Nodding, I turned to the door. I would have time, later, to learn more. This was not the end.

“Cullen is going to tell you to be sure that beast hears you,” she called out, and I glanced back to make sure she was addressing me and not Bull. She was smiling again – _Void take that smile_ – and I could almost hear her saying _you got this_.

“If you are to have a chance,” Cullen said as I shouldered open the heavy double doors, “if _we_ are to have a chance – make sure that beast hears you.”

Impossible. I met her eyes as the door swung open, and she looked _relieved_ , as if only now convinced I believed her.

And I did.

Void take me, I believed her. I didn’t know her _name_ , and already I would follow her to my death.

A death that was not happening today.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how I was going to survive this, or find my way through the snow that was already threatening a full blizzard. I knew nothing, except that there was a strange woman in strange clothes evacuating the Chantry behind me, and that she seemed to think everything was going to be fine.

For the first time in over a decade, I trusted a stranger.

The mark danced across my palm and I felt a weight lift off my shoulders.

“Let’s dance, asshole,” I said, and charged off to meet my fate.


	7. Despair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Hellen  
> From a series of prompts. This one was: A Moment of Vulnerability  
> *  
> Exists between Chapters 3 & 4 of Keep to the Stars, Part 1.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follows directly after the previous chapter, here, although the prompts were numbered differently originally.

The only light in the cave was the sickly green glow of my left hand.

Far above me, an impossible distance to fall, the hole that had been exposed when the hillside gave way was covered once more, the debris of the avalanche somehow sealing my escape behind me. It should have followed me through, should have crushed me where I lay, but the trebuchet I’d fired off as a monumental _fuck you_ to Corypheus had wedged itself in the gap; it had saved me as surely as it had destroyed Haven.

I picked myself off the top of the pile of stones and bits of masonry that had served as my bed.

I hurt _everywhere_.

I was getting used to pain, but this was something else. I pushed myself into a staggering sort of walk – there was one exit from the cave that I could reach, a wandering sort of channel that seemed to lead _up_ – and focused on gathering up the mana to start healing myself.

Four broken ribs.

Broken (right) wrist.

Torn tendon in my (right) shoulder.

Sprained (right) elbow.

I’d plainly landed on my right side, and it took the better part of an hour to get everything functioning again. I still _hurt_ – bruises and aches I would be better served by sleeping off – but I was moving.

The mark… the _anchor_ crackled with an unfamiliar power an instant before I stumbled into a small pack of disembodied demons. Wisps, they were called, but I’d be damned if I thought of them as anything short of demons. I surrendered to instinct and channeled through the anchor, and a small rift opened in the air above the wisps.

_Oh, wonderful, now I’m opening the damn things too_.

It consumed the wisps and then closed itself, and I was left staring at the space it had vacated in surprise. I would thank Corypheus for the new parlor trick… right before my small army ripped him into bits. If I couldn’t do it myself, next time I would have backup.

Lots of backup.

I made my way down the now-definitely-headed- _up_ tunnel until a sudden gust of wind nearly forced me backwards. There was a twist to the side and then, abruptly, I was back on the surface. The world beyond the cave that had hidden me from the Elder One – and a fucking _avalanche_ , let us not forget that bit – was experiencing the sort of blizzard that only happens in the Frostbacks.

Thus the fucking name.

I glanced backward into the cave, considering the marked change in temperature and lack of wind only a few feet back from the entrance. I peered out in to the night, darkened further by the storm, and could see a glow of firelight that _had to be_ the fleeing Inquisition, disappearing off into the north… with the power of the southward-rising storm at their backs, they would be blown into shelter soon, if they weren’t already. There were a few heaps of lost and broken equipment in the snow – a wagon here, a barrel there – but all of that would be hidden by the snow within hours.

The wagon was already buried to its axles.

Behind me, something was spawning wisps, and another twitch of the anchor suggested an open rift that I had somehow stumbled past without noticing, probably in the minutes after expending the anchor’s energy on that temporary, demon-eating rift.

With a sigh, I pushed off from the protective stone and trudged into the only slightly visible trail of the retreating army. It would disappear soon, blown over and filled, but they were heading north. As long as I kept the wind at my back and kept moving, kept angling towards the distant glow of torches, I would be alright.

I wasn’t going to die out here.

An hour later, I was cursing the decision. It was much better to face a rift spitting wisps than to try to outlast a blizzard. _What the fuck were you thinking, Adaar?_ I had a weapon against the rift, against the wisps. The only thing I had to fling at the blizzard was myself, and I had a lot of better uses for my body than as cannon fodder.

Another backrub from Bull would be nice. The Ben’Hassrath was the only person in camp with the angle and hand strength to work the tension out of my shoulders.

Dorian had a trick with runes and heating water that made these amazing bubbling baths that were beyond the comprehension of mortal man.

Cullen was an uptight, Templar sympathizing _jackboot_ , to steal Sera’s phrase, but the man could outplay Dorian and Bull both in chess without breaking a sweat. Leliana refused to play with him – and I was beginning to think it was because she was afraid to lose. The man was _brilliant_ , and he buried it underneath layers of protocol and a thin veneer of sass. He owed me a match, and I was looking forward to getting my ass handed to me.

There was a brazier in the snow, tipped over and cold. It appeared to have been lost, not placed, and for a moment I hoped to find a cinder buried there, a brief respite from the searing cold.

No such luck. With a sigh I pressed on. The torchlight was dimming in the north – being extinguished by storm or a desire for stealth, I could not say. But it was still in the north, still my beacon in the night. The wind howled harder at my back – or was it wolves? – and I pressed on.

Dorian! When we weren’t bashing the Qun we were playing opposites, our magic calling upon life and death, child of privilege meets child of poverty. And yet… coming from opposite directions, we somehow met in the middle and rejoiced. Already I missed that self-absorbed piece of shit. Void take him if I died out here… no one would suffer his presence for long if I wasn’t around to support him.

Was I going to die out here?

I had long since gone cold on the right side, the numbness an alarming if necessary alternative to aches and pains. My feet were never cold, but I suspected that was because they didn’t really sense temperature… they never got hot, either, even when absently walking across a fire pit in my youth. It was a kossith thing… I’d never known a qunari or Vashoth who could feel temperature in their feet. The idea was odd, really… wasn’t it a horrible weakness to have the part farthest from your heart susceptible to the cold?

Was the newcomer wrong?

There had been no _goodbye_ in her eyes, no sense that she was sending me off to my death. But maybe that had been intentional. Maybe she had played me. Maybe she had been Corypheus’ instrument all along, meant to encourage me to leave the Chantry rather than join in the escape. Maybe she was pressing the Inquisition ahead, telling them Corypheus had killed or captured me, and was just encouraging them to extend their lead more and more with the storm to slow me down and fire mages to hurry them on.

Maybe I had been wrong about everything.

I shouldn’t have left the cave. I should have stayed and fought the wisps, the rift. I shouldn’t have left the Chantry, I should have been smarter, should have been faster, should have come up with another plan. I should have listened to Cullen when he’d said she was playing me, should have taken the advice of the best military mind I had, rather than trusting the stranger who had _literally_ appeared out of thin air. I should have trusted my instincts-

But I had. _I had_. And they were what had brought me here. One gut reaction after another, dragging me down into a spiral of self-doubt and despair.

I was going to die out here.

There was another brazier in front of me, suddenly, and I realized as I reached it that I had been subconsciously struggling towards it for nearly fifteen minutes. There was a long stretch of nothing behind me, a row of staggering footprints disappearing into the distance across an otherwise featureless expanse of white. The sky above me was clearing, and I realized the snow I felt thrown against my back was only the wind. I had outlasted the blizzard.

The brazier was still warm.

There was a glow to the air just ahead, around a bend in the rocks making up the mountainside, and I forced my way through the hip-deep snow, one painstaking step at a time.

I cleared the lip of what proved to be a long ravine.

The Inquisition was camped within.

“There! It’s her!”

“Boss!”

“Thank the Maker!”

Cullen and Cassandra and Bull – oh fuck yes Bull – were storming up the hill. The Qunari swept me up and over his shoulder and turned, the only person I trusted to carry my weight who didn’t have four hooves and a mane.

Safe. I was safe.

I was home.


	8. The Battle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gwen & Co decide to solve an argument with a lip-sync battle. Pure fluffy goofiness.
> 
> Spoilers for KttS: Make sure you've read to at least Chapter 6 of Part 3 if you don't want to be spoiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I came home from a rotten day at work and wanted to write something silly to cheer myself up. Here it is. (two months later)

“No!” I laughed. “No, that’s not true _at all_.”

“It is so!” Twitch contended, straight-faced. “Until very recently, all conflicts on our world were solved with _music_ , you know it’s true.”

“World War One-“

“Christmas Truce. Belleau Wood, by Garth Brooks.”

“That didn’t decide the war!”

“Bullshit it didn’t.”

He was trolling me. I knew he was trolling me. I could not help feeding this troll.

“Vietnam didn’t-“

“Oh _bullshit_. The Beatles? The most popular band of all time? Really? The Stones? The entire hippie movement? Do _not_ tell me music didn’t decide that.”

I laughed helplessly. “You are so full of _shit_.”

“We could have fixed this one, too, if we hadn’t evolved to hate fun.”

“Oh?”

Twitch nodded sanctimoniously. “Lip Sync Battle. Would have worked.”

I tipped my head back and laughed, nearly pitching backwards off my stool in the ‘Rest in the process. Krem, also laughing, leapt to my rescue, catching me just shy of actually losing my balance and setting me aright. I leaned forward instead, resting my face on the table as I laughed until I cried.

“You’re picturing it. I know you are.”

I quickly could do nothing but giggle, and it stayed that way until I was in danger of wetting my pants. I stood up and stumbled away, Twitch still calling out descriptors of _Epic Rap Battles of History_.

I came back from the water closet a bit more composed, and in possession of a plan.

“Alright, let’s solve this your way,” I said, and slammed two cell phones – mine and Jacqueline’s – on the table. “I win, and you stop spreading bullshit. You win, and I completely bow out of this and let you tell whatever stories you want.”

“You want to Jimmy Fallon this?” Twitch said, face breaking into a broad grin. “Fuck _yeah_.” He dug into his pocket for his own phone, which he hadn’t let out of his sight since we’d retrieved it from that sewer in Denerim. “Who’s the judge?”

“Rest of the Chargers,” I said, with a tip of my chin, and grinned at the cheering response.

“I don’t know what’s going on!” Dalish yelled happily. “Woo!”

“Third floor,” I insisted. “Maryden might kill us otherwise.”

Twitch answered by leaping to his feet and charging up the stairs. I followed on his heels, glad – not for the first time – that my infirmary uniform involved _pants_.

We crowded the third floor, and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining the floor sagging under the stout chair Bull dragged up the stairs to hold his bulk. Somehow all thirty-something of the mercenaries packed into the smallest room in the tavern, even with the grand piano crouching in the corner.

“Okay,” Twitch said, leaning across a stool that was serving as our table, all other surfaces being covered with Chargers and tankards. “You can’t use your own phone… you choose between mine or Jacqueline’s, and I’ll choose between hers or yours. Open up both music apps, hit _random_ , and pick which song you want. If you don’t know either – and we’ll get Cole to tell if we’re lying – Cole! – then you get _one_ do-over. But you’re stuck with the second set. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Who goes first?”

“Ladies’ choice!” Bull called.

I grinned and pointed at Twitch. “Pick your poison, kid, you’re going _down_.”

We slid our phones across the stool to one another and without hesitation Twitch hit _shuffle_ on both devices. I leaned over and watched as his choice became clear.

“Oh no!” I laughed.

“Oh _hell yeah_ ,” Twitch cheered. “Oh, shit’s on, donkey kong.”

I leaned against the railing and _cried_ , I was laughing so hard. Twitch threw my phone aside – much to my surprise, as I was _sure_ he was going to choose Macklemore – and held up Jacqueline’s to his mouth like it was a microphone.

“Oh, no way,” I gasped as I wiped the tears off my face with the bases of my palms. “Tell me you’re not really going to-“

His mouth was moving then, the “do dooo do, do dooo do, do do,” at the beginning of _Uptown Funk_ nearly pitching me over the railing in hysterics.

“This hit, that ice cold, Michelle Pfeiffer that white gold. This one for them hood girls, them good girls, straight masterpieces. Stylin’, Whilin’, Livin’ it up in the city. Got chucks on with Saint Laurent, gotta kiss myself I’m so pretty.” At the mention of _chucks_ he pointed at me, but the very next line was a perfect impersonation of Bruno Mars, and I slid to the floor in tears.

The man was a born showman, and he channeled Bruno like his life depending on it. The Chargers _quickly_ caught on, and gave him far more encouragement than he probably needed. I decided then that I was already doomed, and I pitched in to help him out, and take my defeat gracefully.

“I’m too hot,” he lipped, and I mouthed the echoing “hot damn” as he pointed at me and grinned so widely I thought his jaw might dislocate.

“Call the police and a fireman. I’m too hot (hot damn) Make a dragon wanna retire, man. I’m too hot (hot damn) Say my name you know who I am, I’m too hot (hot damn) am I bad ‘bout that money. Break it down!”

I shot to my feet to be his backup singer.

“Girls hit your hallelujah,” Twitch lipped, and I threw my arms up to say “wooo!” Twitch almost lost his composure, breaking character for a moment to laugh, but he accepted me as his background singer.

“Cause Uptown Funk gon’ give it to you. Saturday night and we in the spot. Don’t believe me just watch!”

It was all I could do not to become his dedicated backup dancer, as well, but it was too hard to tear my eyes from Twitch. He _rocked it_. It was like watching Terry Crews doing _A Million Miles_.

“Stop!” he said, and I froze. “Wait a minute. Fill my cup, put some liquor in it. Take a sip, sign a check. Julio! Get the stretch! Ride to Harlem, Hollywood, Jackson, Mississippi. If we show up, we gon’ show out, smoother than a fresh jar of skippy.”

By the time I stopped laughing and could pay attention to the show Twitch was putting on – the man played to win, I had to give him that – he was past the _Uptown Funk you up_ bit and I couldn’t help but dance in my chair when he pointed at me and said “Come on, dance. Jump on it. If you sexy then flaunt it. If you freaky then own it. Don’t brag about it, come show me.”

I was never so glad in my life for the language barrier than kept the vast majority of the Chargers from knowing what the hell we were singing along to.

It was fifteen minutes after he finished before the cheering, hooting, and hollering began to calm down in the Herald’s Rest. There was no way to see around the Chargers, so I was secure in the knowledge that no one but my adopted family would be witness to the crushing defeat I had just be handed.

“You’re up, Perky,” Twitch said with a grin. “I think lady Luck was on my side, though.”

I laughed as I nodded. “Oh, absolutely. Give me Jacqueline’s phone, we’ll see what we get.”

Two devices, two shuffles, and Twitch collapsed to the floor. “Nooooooooo.”

“What?” Dalish asked, swarming to her feet. “What happened?’

“I just lost,” Twitch breathed. “Either way. I _know_ you know Shakira.”

“These hips do not lie, it is true,” I said smugly. “But Lzzy and I go way back.”

“I need another drink first,” Twitch laughed, shaking his head, and then took a daring leap over the rail to the second floor. I emptied my own tankard as he made his way back through the crowd. Like a true gentleman, he’d grabbed a refill for me.

“You’re going to need this for Halestorm,” he said with another laugh.

“Take a seat, kid,” I said, and hit play.

I mimed clapping my hands along with the opening of _I Like It Heavy_ , as Twitch put up one closed fist in a show of support.

I pointed at various Chargers as I lipped, “Some like beautiful, perfect and pretty,” before pointing at myself and then straight at Bull for the line, “I see the good in the bad and the ugly.” The Chief tipped his head back and _roared_ with laughter and Krem raised a fist in the air with Twitch, catching the tone of the song.

“I need the volume one louder than ten, I put the pedal to the metal, needle into the red. And if the windows ain’t shaking, making my heart race, if I can’t feel it in my chest I’m in the wrong damn place.”

I threw the stool to the side and pulled my tunic off, the buttons on one shoulder coming loose so it looked like I tore the garment off. The Chargers who had been lucky enough to grab seats surged to their feet.

“I got a demon in my soul and a voice in my head, its saying GO! GO! GO! I can sleep when I’m dead. There’s a sonic revelation bringing me to my knees and there’s a man down below who needs my sympathy.” I ran my hands down my thighs as suggestively as had probably ever been done in public in Thedas and then threw my arms wide, “Got a ringing in my ears getting ready to burst, screaming Hallelujah Mother Fucker, take me to church!”

I kicked a chair away and did everything I could to channel my inner rockstar. “I like it louder than the boom of a big bass drum. I need it harder than the sound of guitar grunge. I love to crank it up, make it thump, and evil to the core. Headbanging in the pit and _throwing my horns_.” I did just that, and the Chargers _screamed_ their approval. “And just like old school Sabbath, Zeppelin and Lemmy – I need to drop it down low and make it heavy. I like it heavy!”

My hair came loose and I threw it around as I danced as I had only ever before dared to do alone in my kitchen with the blinds pulled.

“I ride the lightning, roll with the thunder. Going down _down down_ with my sisters and brothers.” I pointed at the Chargers as I ground down to the floor and grinned as fists went into the air in response. “I fell in love with their darkest parts, stand on the side of the wild at heart. I picked the feather off a crow so I could fly – since I was 13 years old I’ve had my fist to the sky!” I punched the air and almost lost my composure when Bull mimicked the gesture with a bellowed “ _YEAH!”_

I got through the chorus again and rocked out through the refrain, and when I got to _throwing my horns_ this time I translated it into Common and shouted it over Lzzy Hale’s voice. I put my hands up for calm as the music stilled. I closed my eyes and pressed a hand to my heart, using the other one to pick up the stool. I leaned down on it and let my knees go weak as I pulled out the country finish.

“Take me home tonight, I’d do anything with you. Buy a bottle of whiskey, we’ll get matching tattoos. Tell me that you love me, oh let me drive your car. We can sit ‘til morning light just counting every star. ‘Cause if there’s a hell I’ll meet you there, if there’s a heaven they’re serving beer. If you’re an angel then I must be high… Oh if there’s a church it’s rock and roll, if there’s a devil I sold my soul. It’s alright, whatever we do tonight.” I gave the English speakers in the room my best bedroom eyes. “If there’s a god, damnit she won’t mind. If there’s a god, _baby_ she won’t mind.”

The applause was thunderous. I broke character and collapsed to the floor laughing, with Twitch dropping beside me with near-hysterical tears running down his face.

It took just as long for calm to be achieved, but eventually Bull stood me up and declared me the winner – with conditions.

“You gotta sing the end of that for real,” he said. “And the Chargers are going to want the translation.”

I took a steadying breath, finished the second tankard – to another round of thunderous applause – and then reached up to hold on to Bull’s forearm and Twitch’s shoulder as I belted out my best Lzzy Hale impersonation.

As I finished – to another hearty round of applause – a disturbance started at the back of the crowd, near the door to the battlements. Someone pushed their way all the way to the front of the Chargers, with grumbled complaints falling instantly silent as people were jostled and shifted.

Cullen moved the last of the Chargers aside to appear in the front of the group, and as Twitch collapsed to the floor in another fit of laughter, I was lifted off my feet, thrown over the Commander’s shoulder, and hauled out of the tavern. The Chargers cheered my departure, and I blew laughing kisses from my undignified position, dangling upside-down against Cullen’s back.

“I won!” I protested happily as Cullen carried me across the battlements. We cut through his office and I realized we were making a bee-line for our rooms. “What is this, am I grounded? I won! You should have seen Twitch!”

“I _did_ see Twitch,” Cullen grunted, and I jumped to the next conclusion right before he voiced it. “And I watched your entire… display… without doing anything to interfere or throw the contest.”

“Display?” I echoed. “Display? I just won an _epic_ lip-sync battle, I’ll have you know!”

“Yes,” Cullen agreed shortly. “I saw.”

“So… what… why…”

He kicked open our door, slammed it shut, locked it with _far_ more force than was necessary, and set me on my feet with a gentleness totally at odds with his demeanor.

“Cullen, why-“

He was kissing me then, his hands cupping my jaw, his body bearing me backwards until I was caught between the door and a Commander I only then realized was bereft of armor. My feet were dangling inches off the ground and I was immediately pinned.

“Oh, so I’m _not_ in trouble,” I breathed when his mouth released mine and roved down my throat.

“You are in _so much trouble_ ,” he contested, and I wrapped my arms around his neck with a sound that might have been a giggle.

“Yeah? Do I need to-“ I lost my train of thought as his teeth grazed my collarbone and my legs twisted around his waist of their own volition. “Hmm. Do I need to sing my way out of this one, too?”

“Absolutely,” he answered, and lifted me away from the door. “Later,” he told the pale skin covering my sternum as he carried me to bed. “A lot later.”

 


	9. First Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is me doing nothing short of taking utter liberties with First Day.  
> Sits between Part 3, Ch 10 (Before the Plunge) and Part 3, Ch 11 (The March) of Keep to the Stars.
> 
> Here there be spoilers, if you aren't up to at least Part 3 Ch 6 or so.

“How do we celebrate First Day?” I asked Hellen the next morning, when she and Dorian arrived to chase me out of bed.

“We’ll assign you a mug in the kitchen,” she replied with aplomb. “Write your name on it, that’ll solve some problems later.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Get Dagna to do it, she’ll have something more permanent than magic,” Dorian advised. “Alexius kept changing the enchantment on my mugs one year. By the end of the day there were thirty-seven tankards with his name on it, and not a one with mine.”

“Tankards?” I repeated dumbly. “Dorian, since when do you drink _anything_ out of a tankard?”

“Today and only today, Gwennie love,” he replied. They had either agreed to fuck with me before showing up this morning or this was a real thing that was actually about to happen. “First day calls for a certain banality, after all.”

“I’m just going to wait and ask Viv,” I sighed.

My bathing buddies protested loudly, but given they were laughing uncontrollably at the time I didn’t put much stock in their assertions of honesty.

“Madame de Fer,” I said roughly an hour later, upon finding the Iron Lady draped across a chaise on the loft in the main hall. “I am trying to learn about Thedosian traditions in regards to First Day, and you’re the only person I trust to be completely honest with me. I think Dorian and Hellen are, well… I think they’re fucking with me.”

“Did you get your tankard yet, my dear?” Vivienne asked, gesturing to the classy gilded mug perched upon the end table nearby. _Vivienne_ was written in a glowing, ethereal sort of script across the front. “I did not think to have one made up for you. It is best to have your own.”

“Since when do _you_ drink out of a tankard?” I gasped.

Vivienne waved an elegant hand in pleasant dismissal. “No one is _fucking with you_ , my dear. First Day calls for tankards, and tankards we all shall have. Perhaps Josephine has one set aside for you.”

I completely forsook Josie and headed straight for Dagna.

“Tell me I didn’t just see Lady Vivienne with a _tankard_ ,” I asked the brilliant smith.

“Oooh! Gwen! I’m so glad you’re here! I realized this is your first First Day with us, and I made you a commemorative tankard! I thought that even if Josephine or Hellen or Varric – most likely Varric – had already gotten you one, you could have this one just to remember the day. Ancestors know the rest of us won’t.”

“Won’t… remember?”

Dagna shook her head sagely. “We’ve got to purge the memory of the evil of the previous year, and I know you missed part of it, but the last year _sucked_. Aside from meeting you and joining the Inquisition… the _hole in the sky_ and _attack of a Tevinter magister_ and _Wardens being possessed_ and _assassination attempt on the Empress of Orlais_ all on top of the _Conclave blowing up_ means we’ve got a lot of drinking to do.”

“I… I can’t help but think all of you are just fucking with me.”

Dagna smiled at me, with a sage twinkle in her eye. “Don’t take anyone’s word for it, Gwen. Just give it ‘til noon and then try to keep up.” She handed me a work of art cleverly disguised as a tankard. “And take this. You’ll need it.”

The stein I was to drink out of that day was singularly beautiful. It was a wood so dark it looked ebon, and finished with layer after layer of highly polished resin so it _shined_. It was perfectly symmetrical – which was saying something in a pre-industrial world – and the handle curved around my hand as if one had been cast from the other. Seemingly embedded in the wood was a rather precise spiral of thinly spun metal, polished until it sparkled like diamonds. Around the very lip of the mug, in writing that sparkled in the torchlight, was my name in Dagna’s methodical script: _Seeress Gwendolyn Rhiannon Murray, Blessed Herald of Andraste_.

“How the fuck did you get all that to fit?”

“With skill and talent beyond mortal belief,” Dagna quipped. She waved her own mug – an only slightly less ornate version of my own – towards the door. “Now let’s go get some foam in these bitches.”

I came to find out the guard that day was populated entirely with non-drinkers and volunteers; the soldiery was well aware they were marching to war in the morning, and while the beer would be more free than normal they were all expected to be reasonable. The penalty was self-imposed, of course; marching with a hangover was its own special sort of hell.

Everybody else, however, was milling around the courtyards and halls with mugs and tankards of varying degrees of decoration. At first it seemed like the nobility – and those born into it, like mages who grew up in rich families before being shipped to the Circles – were the only ones to have anything more than simple wood or metal. But I kept seeing people I didn’t expect – all of the Chargers, for example, and a number of servants – with inexplicably lovely First Day mugs.

“I need more information on the mugs,” I admitted to Twitch once I found him.

“Ha! I remember what that was like,” he laughed. Breakfast that morning was particularly hearty, as nobody wanted to start drinking on empty stomachs. We sat at a long table in the main hall and partook in what was essentially bacon and eggs… just with no pigs or chickens involved.

“Shouldn’t there be… god, I’m going to sound like such a snob. But what determines how fancy your tankard is?”

“Why do some really poor people have some really fancy beer holders?” Twitch summarized.

I nodded.

“It seems that, most everybody has simple tankards, for the most part. Maybe just whatever they’re using at the pub or whatever you’ve got handy at home. But if something happens in your life – death of a spouse, a child, some terrible loss – that you really want to forget, maybe you scrape up the money and invest in a nicer tankard. It’s a badge of honor, in a way. A lot of people got them after the Blight, especially if they lived somewhere that a lot of neighbors died. Easy time to increase your income, get some pocket change to waste on a mug, if you know what I mean.”

“Nobody around to claim the land? The house? The hidden lockboxes? Yeah, I can see that.”

Twitch shrugged. “There will be a lot more, after this year. Probably why you’re seeing so many. Dagna and Harritt have offered to make ‘em, at cost, for anybody with reason to get a commemorative tankard this year.  A lot of people joined the Inquisition because they’d lost everything. Some didn’t take ‘em up on it, figured they wouldn’t be alive to use it again next year. But the civilians, especially, did. That, and the Inquisition pays pretty well. Anybody who wants to can more or less afford it, with how little the undercroft is charging.”

“And yours?”

“Year I joined the Chargers,” Twitch answered, twirling the highly polished silver-looking tankard around one hand. “I decided to forget everything that had come before, just be _Twitch_ and not try to keep two people riding around in my head. This was what came from that decision.”

I grinned at him. “Fat lot of good that did you.”

He bumped his shoulder into mine playfully. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

“Right,” I laughed.

“So, this tankard? I know you’re all high and mighty now, but you put _beer_ in it.”

“Oh? Beer? What sort of plebian bullshit is-“

“BEER TIME!” Sera shouted, from maybe three feet to my left. I was sure my ear drum was shattered. I actually checked for blood. While I was making a show of popping my ear, the first of the barrels was broached.

Total pandemonium reigned.

It seemed everyone had _not_ been fucking with me that morning. I did not witness one person in Skyhold – aside from the guards – doing anything other than drinking beer from their tankards and exchanging stories of the past year.

“At my own salon!” Vivienne was declaring, her voice a familiar mix of amusement and contempt, to a group of three or four other people in her loft. “So, naturally, I froze him solid.”

“Fell from right there,” Gatsi said, from almost directly below Vivienne’s loft, pointing to the flagstones near the door to the garden. “Scaffolding shifted and he lost his blighted footing, fell and snapped his fool neck. About took three others out with him. Ser Morris was good about it… sent reparations to the blighter’s family.”

“On her _head_ ,” Hellen was laughing from where she sprawled sideways across her throne, as I wandered up, mug of beer untouched. “You’d think the Maker’s Bride would cushion her descent _at the least_. Ideally, she’d waltz her through all grace and grins. But, no. Headshot. _Pow!_ ” The Inquisitor reached for me as I drew near, and pulled me into her lap. I sat sideways on her, which meant I sat almost-properly on the throne, just with a rough Vashoth cushion between me and the harsh seat. “You’re not drinking?” she asked, peering into my tankard.

“You all know all my stories already,” I answered, and she sighed at me as she smiled. “Everything that I want to forget from the last year… I _had_ forgotten. I remembered, and you all remembered with me. Forgetting again…? It seems wrong, somehow.”

“Forgetting isn’t the precise word,” Hellen told me, using English. “There’s a… subtlety in the word that I think you’re missing. Fair, given your newness to the language. Yes, the point isn’t to have the negative memories drawn into the new year… but that doesn’t mean they no longer exist. They just aren’t prominent anymore. Think of it more as… as… oh, maybe _retire_ instead of _forget_.”

I felt the frown on my face more than I felt the intention of putting it there. “You’re right, there is an … odd… flavor to the word in Common. Like you’re deprioritizing the memory, more so than eliminating it?”

Hellen nodded happily. “The First Day purge is not mass-murder, Gwennie love. It’s airing your brain out so new memories can have the space they need and deserve. And, hopefully, something negative you might be dwelling on can be laid to rest.”

“You went to Adamant without knowing what you were walking in to,” I told her after a long moment of thought.

“Yeah?” she encouraged, leaning back and taking another long pull from her tankard.

“Yeah. And when you came back… Andraste’s asshole, I was so convinced you were going to hate me. So many times, you came home and I was dead convinced you were going to hate me. I thought, over and over again, _this is it. This is when she kills me_. But you never did. You always forgave. And that just left me feeling guilty about doubting you to begin with.”

Hellen nodded. “A good first attempt,” she said, gesturing for me to take a drink. “Try something more specific. A particular memory.”

I drew a long breath. “My husband died.”

She quirked an odd sort of smile at me. “Yeah? Tell me about it.”

I took three long swallows from my tankard. “Well, I came home from work…”

 

*

 

“What did you _do_?” Siren cooed as I paused in the story to take another long drink.

My tankard didn’t seem to ever empty. It was the strangest thing.

“What did I do?” I laughed. The faces in the crowd blurred, but there were easily twenty people hovering around the throne that Hellen and I were inelegantly sprawled across, our feet on opposite arm rests and my ass firmly in her lap. “I hauled off and I _punched that bitch in the face!”_

“You’re damn right she did!” Varric howled from somewhere nearby. “So I whipped Bianca around, snapped the safety off-“

“While I covered Gwen in a barrier!” Vivienne chimed in gleefully.

“And I hauled her stupid ass out of the room!” Blackwall concluded.

There were tankards pounding on the arms of chairs, on the floors, on other tankards, and we all agreed the entire incident was ridiculous – and confined to the past. I gave Varric a sloppy kiss on the cheek – that he happily leaned over to accept.

“I confessed to a crime I ran from for over a decade,” Blackwall – Thom Ranier – offered up, then, and we all turned to help him purge the memory rather than carry it into his new year.

 

*

 

“There’s no memory here!” I hollered up to Twitch.

“You’re goddamn right there’s not!” the Charger called back in English. “We finished that shit up _hours_ ago!” He switched back to Common as he turned his attention back to the rudimentary hand-held pump he was affixing to the bunghole of a barrel of beer. “We’ll have Bull hold your feet, you do a handstand, and I pump the beer into your mouth.”

“Why?” Rocky asked, canting an eyebrow at Twitch.

Twitch shook his head as his hands went up in incredulity. “What do you mean, why? It’s a fucking keg stand, that’s why. Get up there. Horns up!”

The room exploded with the repeat of the phrase, and Bull roared something wholly unintelligible - some jumbled mix of English and Qunlat – and swung Rocky’s legs up over his head.

I laughed and fled the scene. There were more memories to be had in the keep, somewhere, and I intended to find them.

 

*

 

“Maker, I was so angry with you,” Cullen said, gently, in conclusion. We were alone on the roof of the tower we called Home, a balefire flask lighting up the air around us. I snuggled deeper into the blanket we shared, our tankards long since empty and forgotten somewhere in the levels below. The sounds of celebration were muted from there and slowly fading; people dropping off to sleep as the stars came out.

“I know,” I whispered. “I wanted so badly to tell you… and then Cole… Augh, Cole.”

“The look on your face when you realized Cole could hear your thoughts as well as anyone else’s…” he remembered, his chuckle barely more than a rough breath. “I tried to maintain some cynicism, but you were _so relieved_ that he could _read your mind_. There has never been a more convincing display of innocence, a complete lack of guile, than that. I believed you utterly and instantly.”

“That’s not something you need to purge, is it?” I asked, poking him gently in the side.

Cullen shook his head, pressing a dry kiss to my forehead. “Never.”


	10. Fools Rush In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Hellen  
> From a series of prompts. This one was: A Moment They Made a Mistake  
> *  
> Should not be read before Keep to the Stars, Part 3, Chapter 12  
> Because _holy shit, spoilers_

I tumbled out of the eluvian into the area Morrigan had called _the crossroads_. It was like the Fade, but _not_. The Witch of the Wilds was already standing within, gazing around with the sharp eye of a scholar but the face of a homesick child. I drew my mana together to shield everyone coming through behind me, not knowing what we would find on the other side of the elves’ magic mirror.

“There is nothing here to hurt you, Inquisitor,” Morrigan chided me softly. “The true danger is what we just fled.”

Varric tumbled out, and I caught him and set him to rights before Sera nimbly followed. She was cursing – colorfully and loudly – as Varric took stock of his new environment and shuddered. “Too old for this shit,” I heard him mutter, his disgust barely audible under Sera’s discomfort.

Cassandra was the next through, sword drawn but with a look on her face that said she wasn’t worried about the world inside the eluvian.

She was worried about _me_.

“What’s happened?” I demanded.

Anders appeared with the _exact same look_ on his face, and took up a position to Cassandra’s left.

Slightly behind her shield, in a support position.

Facing _me_.

“What the bloody fuck is going on here?” I asked, and felt the rage slip. My hands started to shake and I was pulling more mana than was entirely safe.

Cole came through with his back to me, as if he'd been looking behind him until the last possible moment. He staggered to the side - the first time I'd ever seen him take a step that wasn't liquid grace - and crumpled into a heap. My heart skipped a beat as I heard him draw in a shaking breath, as if he meant to cry. 

Alistair tumbled out, spitting mad, and before he could get his feet under him, Solas smoothly slid through the portal and to the side. An instant later, Hawke fell through, backwards, arms around Merrill as if he had tackled her on the way.

The eluvian closed behind her.

The rage vanished.

“Gwen?” I asked, and hated how broken I sounded.

“She cannot cross an eluvian, lethallan,” Merrill said, her voice infinitely gentle. “Much like the rifts, she is too immutable to interact safely with a portal such as this. We would have lost her and the eluvian both.”

“You cannot-“

“I can know. As did she. She did not argue. She stayed behind to close the eluvian behind us, to make sure Corypheus could not possibly follow.”

 _That_ option vanished along with the mana I had clenched around my hand like a glove of force. “We… we cannot go back?”

Merrill shook her head.

Alistair was making sounds like a wet cat, Hawke backing him into a corner and talking quickly, Varric with one hand on either man’s elbow and adding a word every now and then in low tones. Alistair was rapidly spirally into despair and I fumbled for the anger to protect me.

It simply was not there.

I had left her to die.

I had misjudged the threat – looking ahead rather than behind – and used the weakest of us as a shield. Cassandra had known, Alistair had known, _Anders_ had known, and they had come through the eluvian prepared to fight me… whether to avenge their Herald or subdue my rage, I didn’t know. But I couldn’t be angry, even at myself. I had failed her.

“Maker’s breath, I’ve killed her.”

In the silence that was the crossroads, I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.


	11. The Light, When it's Burning Low

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Hellen  
> From a series of prompts. This one was: A Moment of Loss  
> *  
> Should not be read before Keep to the Stars, Part 3, Chapter 14.  
> Because, holy shit, _spoilers_.

I had never been religious.

I’d been hauled away, kicking and screaming, when my parents had been shredded by Genlocks swarming out of the ground when I was thirteen. I had been revealed as a mage the year later, a vocation shunned by the Chantry and the Qun both. The Maker thought me a servant, and Koslun considered me dangerous chattel. I was neither.

Watching Gwen convert slowly to Andrastism had been painful, at first. We had been kindred spirits, once I’d gotten over my foolish infatuation with her and recognized she was ten years my senior and better matched to Cullen, Blackwall, or even Solas – and was I ever glad she’d opted for Cullen. Her own Faith had been a buffer between her and the Chantry, the _church_ of her birth being more important than the foreign gods worshipped in Thedas. When I’d been called by Mother Giselle to carry her, shak _ing_ and shak _en_ , from the chapel in Skyhold, the revelation that she had _met_ Andraste had burned a hole behind my sternum.

She was one of _them_ now. She was a convert to a faith that wanted me shackled, speaking the language of the people who wanted me silenced.

I was wrong, of course. I was so often wrong with her. As she blossomed into her faith, our relationship did not change. She brought Anders – _Anders_ of all people – into the Inquisition and spent more and more time with Hawke and Solas. Believing in Andraste changed nothing about her, except her choice of epithets. She stopped using those three names – Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – and started taking Andraste’s name in vain like the rest of us, and besides that she was exactly the same.

So I listened to her, as I always ended up doing eventually, anyways. I dug through the old texts Dorian and Solas found for me when I was idle on the road. I finally read the damn Chant, and I did it with fresh eyes and a grain of salt. On the road back from the Shrine of Dumat, I engaged Cullen in theology as Gwen once had, and it served to keep his mind from the loss of Maddox as well as helping me understand my advisors – Andrastians, all.

But I didn’t _believe_ like they did. There were always other possibilities for who and what Gwen was, for how she came to be there. I resisted the religious answer until the bitter end.

It should come as no surprise that it was Gwen that finally made me believe.

Merrill was in the air as a dragon, and Void take her if she wasn’t _terrifying_. She was adept at toxins and blood magic to begin with, and converting that specialty into a _dragon_ was a unique kind of horrible… for those opposing her, at least. She threw the blighted drake to the stones, some distance from where we fought to keep Corypheus occupied, and Blackwall immediately threw himself onto the beast’s neck.

The fake Warden slew the fake arch demon, and I let myself step out of the fight for a moment and feel the amusement while it was still fresh.

The dragon was thrashing, breaking rocks and scattering debris in his death throes, and as I thumbed off the cap of a vial of lyrium – for the final push to kill this magister son of a bitch – I watched it breath its last.

The instant the light left its eyes, I lifted the lyrium to my mouth.

It didn’t get there.

_Mother Mother Mother Mother_

I rarely heard Wisdom while I was awake. Generally her thoughts were whispers beneath my consciousness, ideas so subtly introduced I rarely realized they were not my own. She had never led me astray, and I had come to trust her as almost a more accessible intuition.

To hear her, and for her voice to be practically screaming for Gwen, left me immediately with only one possible explanation.

Gwen was dead. Or, soon to be.

I glanced towards the north, remembering the hard day of riding that got us to Haven through the mountains, even with the special stamina draughts for the horses. There was no way I could get back in time to save her.

I looked back at the yet-twitching body of the dragon and realized Corypheus had lost a part of his soul in the exact moment I had lost mine. In that instant, I believed.

Andraste had given her to me. Andraste had taken her away. The thousands of paths that had led us to that impossible moment – that implausible _coincidence_ – coalesced in this perfect storm, and lit a fire in me that I could not control, in the moment I most needed to burn. Nothing could have enraged me like the murder of my sister, in the place where she should have been safe.

“Was that your doing?” I demanded, pushing my way to the front of the fight, where Cassandra and Bull warily stalked around the Elder One, who was himself surrounded with a shield of energy while he tried to adapt to the dragon’s death. “Did you launch an attack on Skyhold?”

“The Breach causes other rifts to spawn,” Corypheus gritted as he pushed himself back upright. “If one opened in your pitiable fortress-“

He was still talking. I did not care. I tossed the lyrium potion down my throat and opened myself to the rage that perpetually simmered just below the surface, bubbling away beneath every action I ever took.

“Boss-“ the Iron Bull warned. If anyone understood the rage, it was Bull.

“Gwen’s dead,” I answered, Wisdom’s voice becoming a wordless wail, echoing in the recesses of my mind.

This wasn't the fear in the crossroads. This wasn't the worry of her Fade Step to the Exalted Plains. This wasn't even the terrible rage when she'd been shot in Halamshiral. 

No, this was the unsettling, inescapable truth. I didn't know what it was that convinced them; my manner, Corypheus' mention of a rift in Skyhold, maybe just my tone of voice. But there was no cautious optimism to meet my announcement.

The entire group went still. For a moment there was no movement, no words, no _breathing_. I was rage and sorrow, my existence focused into a narrow point defined by the keening of Wisdom that only I could hear. We'd been together long enough, fought shoulder-to-shoulder long enough, bled and cried and screamed together enough, that I could feel my companions practically drinking in my rage.

Twelve faces turned towards the Elder One, and twelve jaws set resolutely in place. For his part, Corypheus never showed fear, not even when the Merrill-dragon reared back and screamed her grief at the sky and then exploded, leaving a petite – _enraged_ – blood mage in its place.

…a blood mage standing on top of a dead lyrium drake’s worth of blood. She jammed the bladed end of her staff into the corpse’s neck; the blood gushed out as a vapor, and she breathed in its power.

I heard myself roaring before I knew I’d opened my mouth. There was energy to be found in the Fade - nearly limitless energy, and Wisdom had released my bindings. I pulled harder and drank deeper than I had ever dreamed before, and I became what they called me:  _Saarebas._  I threw myself into the air and gathered energy as I leapt, pressing  _back_ against the sky to plummet faster than mere gravity could draw me. I impacted with the shield Corypheus had drawn around himself and  _shattered it_ , driving him into the ground before me. He staggered back and for a moment, one beautiful moment, he knelt at my feet. Then he was standing and the battle began in earnest.

It’s the last memory I have of the fight. They say Corypheus used the orb to pull the mountaintop into the air, but I hear Wisdom’s voice in the silent moments of the night, and she knows it was me. She knows it was _us_ , screaming defiance at the sky for its theft, for _stealing_ from us the only family we had. Gwen's was the only hand Wisdom had ever held. She was the first person I had held in my arms and _protected_. She was my sister, my confidante, and the first person I had trusted with my whole soul.

I fed Corypheus through the Fade in pieces, trillions of pieces; every iota of his essence shot through and locked on the other side, locked away from the Wardens who could provide a body for his regeneration, away from the multitudes he meant to stand above as a god. The rift that I had opened in his chest imploded, and I directed the energy upward, through the orb I had stripped from his hands, and slammed the Breach shut, permanently.

Then, for good measure, I directed the last of the residual energy into the orb itself, targeting it with its own essence, pushing with every ounce of burning rage and molten lyrium in my veins until the orb _shattered_ , splitting in half in my hands.

I dropped the damned thing to the ground, the battered remnants of the legacy of a lost god, a two-faced bastard who had betrayed his kin and then sent his property into the future to betray mine. “The orb was Fen’Harel’s,” I spat at Merrill, who nodded. It hadn’t been hard to pick out the writing, with what Merrill had been teaching me of ancient elvhen and the eluvians. “He is responsible for _all_ of this. For the Conclave. For the war with Corypheus. For _Gwen’s death_.” Solas was on the ground before me, gathering up the shards of the orb, and I barely spared him a glance. Let him keep them. I would calm eventually, find a new equilibrium without the cheeky little monkey who had become my center. I would figure out how to love Josephine with a heart torn in two. And then I would ask Solas what he had learned from studying the orb, as Gwen meant at least half as much to him as she did to me, and he would be burning with a need for revenge that mirrored my own. If we could, Solas and I would determine from the orb where Fen’Harel’s soul might be hiding.

If he was hiding in plain sight like Mythal, I was going to find him, and in the name of Gwen Murray I was going to rend him limb from limb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Staring at the bottom of your glass  
> Hoping one day you'll make a dream last  
> But dreams come slow, and they  
> go  
> so  
> fast  
> You see her when you close your eyes  
> Maybe one day you'll understand why  
> Everything you touch surely dies


	12. Favorites

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a series of prompts, this was: A Moment With Something/Someone they Cherish.
> 
> And, come on, there's only one option there. 
> 
> Hellen's POV.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted early and out of order for one of MY favorites, the irreplaceable Dissatisfied_Doodles

It was a rough morning, no other words about it. Cullen, unaccustomed to being with us on the road, held himself stiffly to the side, occupied with organizing our findings and keeping the escort in line. I was torn between working to draw Cullen out and settling into my own camp routine.

With a shake of my head, I turned my back to the Commander and grabbed a comb to repair my braids as if it were any other morning. We would be back in Skyhold in a few days and Gwen would accomplish more in two minutes than what I could spend a week aggravating myself with. He could just be grumpy until then.

Given what we’d found inside the Shrine of Dumat, I couldn’t really blame him for his disquiet.

“Finally, someone on the trip who misses her more than we do,” Dorian quipped, watching Cullen.

“You have to know you’re not her favorite anymore,” I chided, throwing myself down to sprawl on the chill earth beside him.

“Shenanigans,” Dorian countered. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, I maintain my status as _Gwennie’s Favorite_. He might give her toe-curling, window-rattling orgasms, but I gave her _him_ and someday there will be an adorable curly-haired ruffian named for me, you just watch.”

I tried not to laugh at him, and failed miserably. The best thing about Dorian was his continual awareness of his own ridiculousness. When I succumbed to a building giggle, the look he shot me was one of pure joy.

“There won’t be any Rutherford children,” I solemnly informed him once I’d pulled my shit back together. “You know that, right?”

He didn’t answer; not with his voice. Dorian had excessively expressive eyebrows, though, and I read his confusion plainly.

“That scar across her gut – she lost the business end of her ladybits, to use one of Sera’s euphemisms. She doesn’t have anything to carry the children _in_. But on top of that – Cullen took lyrium for over a decade. The chances of him fathering a child are about nil.”

Dorian sighed and curled his shoulders inward, briefly succumbing to terrible posture. A moment later he gave a shake and dove directly back into self-deprecation. “And she, dear that she is, wouldn’t say as much to me and destroy my hopes of being Uncle Dorian to a tow-headed namesake. Still her favorite.”

I burst out laughing again. “You’re not her favorite!”

Dorian shrugged. “Jealousy does not suit you, Hellen love.”

“We’ll get back to Skyhold and _ask her_ , then,” I proposed, and he immediately rose to the challenge.

“We shall! We shall pin her down and make her put in writing _Dorian Pavus is my favorite Tevene in Thedas_.”

I snorted. “Well of course she’ll say _that_.”

Dorian winked. “Then why do we continue arguing? I am her favorite.”

“That makes you _everybody’s_ favorite, Dorian,” I argued, and the altus grinned at me.

“Don’t worry, Adaar. I won’t let it go to my head.”


	13. Tell Her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a series of prompts. This one was: Overcoming an Obstacle
> 
> Hellen's POV. Takes place during the last two chapters - 63 and 64 - of Keep to the Stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can read this before or after the Epilogue of KttS, your choice. But definitely don't read it before Chapter 62, that would ruin everything!

It was the best plan, really. Aside from the fact that Josephine would be out of range, moving away from the slowly-expanding Breach, she also wouldn’t be waiting for news. She would be kept busy, shepherding the visiting nobles out of Skyhold and opening up diplomatic channels in Orlais. If the worst happened, if we didn’t manage to regain the orb and close the Breach, if it really was just a feint to draw me out of Skyhold and kill me… she would have a head start. She could get back to Antiva, spend the end of days with her family.

Or, if having that orb back in my hand killed me… she would be in position to be consoled by her betrothed. I would give her that much: an opportunity for a decent relationship with Otranto.

So it was the best plan. It was the best for the Inquisition, and it was the best possible endings for Josephine. So I dug in my heels and I insisted on it.

“You’re sending me away, Inquisitor?”

There was a stiffness in her tone that I couldn’t quite place. Anger? Shock? Pain? I had never heard it from her before, not even in the first conversations we had in Haven. It put my own dander up. I explained my reasoning, but then my fucking kossith nature betrayed me, and I let slip my anger.

“…Did you have something else you intended to do?”

Her jaw clenched, and I knew – I _knew_ – I had hurt her. “No, Inquisitor. I did not.”

“I have a name, Josie,” I reminded her. I hadn’t had to ask for informality from her in months.

“Yes, Inquisitor,” she enunciated carefully. “I know.” And then she spun on her heel and walked out of my life.

It was entirely possible I would never see her again.

This was my farewell to the love of my life.

But we had work to do. I had mountains to climb, an ancient Tevinter magister to kill, an arch demon to slay, an elvhen somnavorum to reclaim, and a Breach to close. There was no Josephine if there was no world, and Gwen had promised me a few years of peace if we could just put this asshole down.

And so I did.

We crossed the mountains to Haven. We climbed to the summit of what used to be the Temple of Sacred Ashes. We put down the corrupted lyrium drake. I reclaimed the orb and used it to turn Corypheus into so much _dust_. I closed the Breach. And I split that fucking somnavorum in half, so it could never be used again. We got back on our horses and we went home, to find Gwen literally returned from the dead and Skyhold kept safe with her sacrifice.

I should have been happy. I should have been celebrating with everyone else. I should have been _over fucking joyed_ that I had survived this cockup, when we were all sure I was going to be martyred by this shitshow.

But all I could think about was bringing Josephine home.

Gwen had already given me the answer, months ago at Halamshiral. I just had to duel her betrothed. I had long since learned not to doubt her, and had instead commissioned Cassandra to teach me how to duel. Long trips across Orlais had given us ample opportunity to practice, and now I would put the education to the test.

Cassandra was waiting for me the next morning, leaning against the wall in the main hall beside the door that led ultimately up to my lofty apartment. She responded to my raised eyebrow with a shrug and a grunt. “You need a second,” she said. I jerked my chin towards the big double doors at the other end of the hall and she pushed off the wall to fall into step just behind me, to my left.

Something about Cassandra still having my back, after everything, made the trip to Val Royeaux infinitely more bearable. We spoke little, practicing the forms she had taught me three times a day; before setting out in the morning, when we paused for lunch, and between dinner and my vain attempts at sleep in the evening. She asked me no questions, offered no advice; she would toss me one of the two rapiers and assume the stance of a duelist and we would fight until I won, or surrendered to exhaustion.

It was almost too easy to find news of Josephine and Otranto once we arrived at the capital city. She was closeted with the Empress, he was singing her praises in the marketplace. I could throw myself at her feet and beg her to come home, or I could do this the right way. With a mental reminder to _not rip this guy in half_ , I found Otranto on the upper level, outside the shop that used to sell a golden nug.

“Lord Otranto of Antiva?” I asked, striding into the group he was conversing with.

“Yes? Who is asking?”

Cassandra’s voice at my shoulder answered. “She is Inquisitor Hellen Adaar of Skyhold.”

The assembled nobility quieted. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Inquisi-“

“You are to remove yourself from Josephine Montilyet’s association immediately,” I announced as softly as I could manage. _Soft_ isn’t anything my voice was meant for, and I knew the words were heard clearly by everyone within thirty paces.

“As her rightful betrothed, I fear that is not an option,” Otranto answered evenly.

I sighed. “I was afraid you would say that. I regret to inform you that Josephine Montilyet is not available for an arranged marriage. Your claim is invalid.”

“On whose authority?”

“Mine.”

It was a difficult place I put him in, I knew. Honestly, this wasn’t his fault. Honestly, I wish Wisdom would just shut the fuck up and let me be mad about it, and tear him into pieces. Problem fucking solved.

“You place me between the Inquisition and propriety, my lady Adaar,” he told me in a low tone. “I am forced to take up the issue with those who would bar me from participating in the contract meted out by our families. Inquisitor Adaar, you have dealt me insult and I must demand satisfaction.”

“I am the Inquisitor’s second,” Cassandra asserted, stepping forward.

“I will send my second to you to make the necessary arrangements, once I have designated him,” Otranto told her. “Who will I tell him to speak with?”

“Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast,” I told him. “We are staying just outside the city, in the chateau of the late Duke Bastien de Ghyslain.” He paled but nodded, and strode away.

Cassandra met with the man’s second a few hours later, shortly after we'd returned to Vivienne’s graciously loaned chateau. He was not as steady as Otranto had been, knowing he was meeting with a Seeker and the Inquisitor. I was pretty sure he would have picked anybody _except_ us to deliver a challenge to. He was apparently a friend of Otranto, but I honestly didn’t pay enough attention to the man to determine who he was or where he was from.

I was practicing.

The appointment was made for an hour after daybreak the next day, when the sun broke the rooftops in the marketplace.

I made it a point to sleep. I stepped into the Fade, set my head in Wisdom’s lap, and begged her to help me do the right thing. “Don’t let me disappoint Josephine,” I pleaded. She ran cold fingertips down my horns and promised to keep me calm, no matter what, for so long as I would let her. She told me to wake up at dawn, and I rose to find Cassandra in quiet meditation, cross-legged before the hearth.

Keeping vigil had been part of her becoming a Seeker, but I had been surprised to discover she kept up the habit. She rarely allowed herself to be caught in the act – while she was meditating she was hyper aware of her surroundings, her mind silent and senses free. That I had started to frequently find her such I took to be a testament to our friendship.

“Go time,” I told her, and she nodded and rose smoothly to her feet.

Otranto found us at precisely the appointed time, leaning against the wrought iron gate that could be used to close off the docks from the marketplace.

I expected pretty words, flowery insinuations, some canned bullshit of a speech. I didn’t get any of it. Otranto seemed to know exactly what was going on; I had backed the bastard into a corner and he was following the only options left to him. He threw me a rapier, and we squared off.

There was a flow to this that Cassandra had taken great pains to teach me. Engage, beat, counter-beat, beat parry. Recover. Otranto moved first, and I repeated the pattern. I understood it better once we had finished; it was a way to take stock of one another. He now had an idea of my reach, my height, where to place his rapier to meet mine. And I… I suddenly realized I knew what I was doing.

Otranto launched immediately into the appropriate cadence, and I found myself at peace as I settled into the forms. He was not as good as Cassandra. I could do this.

We had barely started, yet taking the measure of one another, when the lady of the hour pushed through the accumulated crowd – none of whom I had noticed arrive – and yelled “ _Stop!”_

“My lady Montilyet, I am pleased you have arrived to see my defense our-“ Otranto began to address her, but she strode past him to strike me square in the sternum with one angry finger. He fell quiet as she plainly ignored him.

“What are you _doing_?”

“Settling a difference,” I answered carefully.

“Are you _insane_? You heard what lady Gwen has said, about _after_. The Inquisition needs you! _I_ need you! Why would you risk your life, risk everything you have built?”

There was a moment, then, when the world went still. The sounds of the marketplace, the songs of the shorebirds, the water against the dock; all of it disappeared as the words I needed to say – the words she needed to _hear_ – fought against the wall I had desperately built to keep them contained, keep them safe.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done, but I opened my mouth, and I confessed the truth to Josephine.

“I love you, Josie. I could not let him take you from me.”

Her jaw dropped, and her eyes flashed. I couldn’t tell if I had embarrassed her, here in the marketplace, calling my feelings to the crowd, but it was too late to take back. I dropped to one knee and extended a hand, palm up, as my other hand pitched the rapier to the side. “Josephine Montilyet, you are the love of my life. Please. Come home.”

Josephine’s hand slowly rose from her sides, where they had been clenched in fists against her thighs. One rose up to cover her mouth, while the other – _oh, thank the Maker_ – the other reached out to take mine.

“You’re so fucked, man,” I heard Otranto’s second mutter.

“Completely fucked,” Cassandra counseled dryly.

Josie didn’t seem to hear. I pulled her slowly towards me after our hands clasped, and stayed on one knee until her other hand came down to cup my cheek, tilting my face up to meet her eyes. “You… you love me?”

“I love you,” I confirmed, feeling utterly naked in the crowd.

Her eyes flickered closed and I watched, entranced, as she took a long, shuddering breath. Her fingers tightened spasmodically in mine and she blinked her eyes open. Her thick lashes were damp, and it somehow, impossibly, made her more beautiful. “Hellen,” she whispered. “Oh, Hellen. I love you.”

I was on my feet before I was conscious I had moved, and swept her up into my arms. She was kissing me, then, kissing me in the marketplace in front of everyone and it was perfect, _perfect_ , everything in my life was finally perfect.

“So I am to understand,” Otranto’s voice interrupted my moment of joy and I almost forgot _this isn’t his fault_ and smote him where he stood. “…that the Inquisition has not protested their Ambassador’s betrothal, but rather the Inquisitor, herself, has made a prior claim.”

“My Lord Otranto, I-“ Josephine, ever the diplomat, started to say.

“I know when I have lost,” Otranto interrupted with a smile, and I was glad I hadn’t torn him into pieces. “I find I cannot adhere to a contract such as this. We shall both withdraw our support for the match and the betrothal will be broken.”

“Thank you,” Josephine told him, simply, and the happiness in her voice was almost more than I could take.

He gestured to me, to her hand still held tightly in my own. “Yes, well. My mother raised no stupid sons. I wish you both well.”

“I didn’t risk my life, you know,” I told Josie as Otranto strode off, his second in his wake, and Cassandra turned to give me a satisfied smirk and then move off to encourage the crowd to disperse. Josie spun back towards me. “I have been training with Cassandra for months, and I was well on my way to kicking that guy’s-“

Josephine interrupted me by throwing herself into my arms and latching her lips onto mine. “Months?” she breathed when we came up for air. “You decided _months_ ago that you would duel Lord Otranto?”

“Since I first heard of it at Halamshiral,” I confirmed.

Josephine tucked her head into my shoulder with a happy sort of sigh.

“Wouldn’t you have been impressed with a dueling scar, though?” I quipped, hoping to hear that vibrating sort of happiness in her voice again.

“I love you precisely as you are,” she countered, and I swept her into my arms and carried her out of Val Royeaux.


	14. The After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The war room meeting in which they finally discuss _what comes after_ and Hellen gets a rather nasty shock.
> 
> Fun fact: this is actually day 10 of the prompt series I've been doing from Hellen's perspective. This was the Free Day. I'm calling it "a moment when they were a searing ball of rage."

We were all together. Josie was _home_ , where she belonged, and the faces around the table in the war room were the faces I had come to rely on. Cassandra, resolute near the door. Leliana drifting back and forth between Cassandra and the table. Cullen and Gwen, directly across from one another and as likely to be watching each other as anything else. Josie, at my right, looked strangely naked without her writing board at hand.

_That_ was a word I needed to avoid thinking about in conjunction with Josephine if I wanted to get any work done.

“Are you ready?” Gwen asked, rather sedately.

“We’ve _been_ ready,” Leliana replied, barely biting back her annoyance. “We’ve been waiting for this for _months_.”

Gwen spun a story that, a year ago, I never would have believed. It started on a bright fall day in her world, with a series of events that created a deluge of refugees to Thedas, who settled in as many places as times. Each step was so small, so simple, that they were individually easy to swallow. The unthinkable amount of time that stretched between her kin arriving in Thedas and their giving rise to the empire of the Elvhen was a stretch, but not impossible. The Evanuris, the infighting, the slavery… that, had all been explained at the Temple of Mythal. Fen’Harel creating the Veil, sealing away the Elvhen “creators,” was flatly in opposition of the Chantry teaching… but so much of the last year had taught me that time faded all things, and men would twist what they needed to, in order to keep power. 

“After creating the Veil and sealing away the Evanuris, Fen’Harel went into uthenera, to sleep. He wandered the world in the Fade, watching history reveal itself, and woke up just recently, maybe a year before the Conclave explosion. He realized he was weakened, massively so, and could not unlock his orb, his _somnavorum_. And so he gave it to Corypheus – via underlings and agents, leading the so-called Elder One to the artifact rather than outright handing it to him. This probably is what started Corypheus’ search for _other_ Elvhen artifacts, as you have noted time and again that he seemed far too focused on finding. Corypheus created a plan to unlock the orb – but it was Fen’Harel’s plan. He intended for Corypheus to die in the explosion that unlocking the orb created and allow the Dread Wolf to scoop it up and go about his way. He did not anticipate Corypheus’ ability to regenerate, nor the interruption of Hellen and her taking of the anchor. Fen’Harel had to find other ways to retrieve his orb from the ancient magister, and fix what had gone wrong when the orb was unlocked. He watched the Inquisition form, and joined on the ground floor-“

“He what?” I asked, shocked.

“-although outwardly forsaking the title of Dread Wolf and instead going by the name of his youth, Solas.”

“What.” I didn’t recognize my own voice.

“Solas is Fen’Harel,” Gwen repeated calmly. “He stayed with the Inquisition hoping to recover his orb, and now that he was unable to, he has left.”

I was standing inches from her, looming over her. Not remembering moving was a bad sign.

“ _His_ orb,” I echoed.

“Yes,” Gwen reiterated.

She had this calm about her that I, for once, envied.

“ _His_ orb,” I said again.

She narrowed her eyes but stayed silent.

I realized my fists were clenched so hard my fingernails had driven into my palms and blood was dripping onto the floor.

“ _His_ orb. _His_ plan. _His_ mistake. _He_ was responsible for the orb that opened the Breach and _killed you_.”

Gwen’s eyes widened and, finally, she understood.

“Yes,” she answered softly, clearly afraid of the reaction I was displaying but staying resolute, reminding me why I loved her beyond reason. “Yes, this was all his mistake.”

I was shaking to the point of palsy. _This_ was why they leashed us. _This_ was why they sewed our mouths shut. _This_ was why we weren’t trusted, weren’t free, weren’t _leaders_. When I was betrayed – perhaps inevitably – I reacted like a mindless beast. I rebelled against it, but the thought was inescapable:

I was going to find him. And I was going to use his own anchor to rend him limb from limb.

He’d knelt at my feet and picked up the shards of the orb and walked away. _Walked away_. And I, blind and foolish, had been so caught up in Gwen’s death I hadn’t looked twice. I had accused him aloud and not seen… not _seen_. Did the guilt show? Or was she an acceptable loss? Was Gwen _collateral damage_ of no particular weight to him? The Conclave hadn’t shaken him, the losses at Adamant and the Arbor Wilds hadn’t caused him to so much as blink. Were we all _tools_ to him?

Maker take me, I had sat in his company for hours and stupidly thought him my friend.

The rage built to the point of exquisite pain, and I _reveled_ in it.

Gwen was facing me now, and I could feel her aura washing over me. The whites of her eyes were doing that fucked up green glowy thing and I knew she was seeing Wisdom as much as she was seeing me, seeing the Fade as much as she was seeing reality. She clenched her tiny hands around my shaking wrists and everything stopped.

I stopped shaking. I stopped gouging my own hand. I stopped feeding the anchor. I stopped _breathing_.

“I’m going to kill him,” I whispered.

“I know,” Gwen answered. “And I’m going to redeem him.”

“How can you-“

“Hellen,” she breathed, and her will lapped against me like waves on the shore. _Calm, calm, calm_. “It will be years before we find him. We still need him. He is not aligned against us; he is his own faction. We need him to regain some power and remove the anchor from you, so that it doesn’t kill you. We need him to take the eluvian network from the Qun. We need him to do a number of things, and they’re all years in the future. We need to take this time and outmaneuver him. Only then will it matter which one of us gets to him first at the end.”

“So it’s a race,” I gritted, almost desperate to keep her from eroding the rage I was depending on to stay together. “You find him first, he’s _redeemed_. I find him first, he’s dog food.”

Somehow, impossibly, there was laughter in her eyes. “He is a man who made a mistake, and does not yet understand that gluing the plate back together does not make the plate whole, does not erase the sound it made when it shattered or the work that was put into picking up the shards. The world is different now, and he has not been awake long enough to understand he cannot just _put it back_. He is powerful, Hellen, and he will make an incredible ally if we can bring him around. I have worked so hard to-“

“Maker’s Breath,” Josephine said, reminding me there were others in the room. “You… all the time you… you have _always known_.”

I watched Gwen’s eyes dart nervously from face to face around the room. I realized with a start that she was not afraid of Solas, of the war, of what was to come… she was afraid of _us_ , of our reactions to the realization that she had _always known_. She was afraid of losing us.

“Yes,” she confirmed gently. “When I opened up my eyes in Haven that first day, when I sent everyone running to evacuate, I met Solas in the infirmary and I called him by name. I knew the wolf jawbone he wore around his neck to be an announcement like a shout, in a language only I could read. I did not remember, then, anything past this day, past the death of Corypheus. I knew Solas would not retrieve the orb, and he would leave… but it was not until Hellen retrieved my memories that I knew where he would go, and why. He escaped into an eluvian – where I cannot follow – and is working to take control of the network. The Qunari control a great deal of the mirrors already, and it will take a minor invasion of Orlais to tilt the balance in his direction. He does not divulge his plan – how he intends to unmake the Veil and restore the elves to immortality – but I know there _is_ one.”

“Does he know you know?” Leliana asked.

Gwen nodded. “I told him, that last night. I told him I knew he would go into the eluvians, I knew he had to wrest them away from the Qun, and I knew I could not follow him, nor would you be able to find him there. We discussed your desire to search for him-“

“Made irrelevant now that I know he is in the eluvians,” Leliana interrupted lightly.

“And he asked me to leave with him.”

“He _what_?” It was in my voice, again, but I did not remember speaking.

“I asked him to stay. He asked me to go. We both desire one another for allies, for friends. We have always known what the other was, accepted one another’s existence as simple truth. I hoped to change his mind through friendship and camaraderie. I hoped I could give him the peer he so desperately needs. When I learned to straddle the Veil, I hoped it would soften his heart. In the end, it only made him jealous, made his desire to _set things right_ all the more powerful. His name, after all, is Pride. I could not convince him to stay.”

“So your hope is to redeem him?” Josephine prompted.

Gwen was frowning at my hands, and began to carefully pick my fingers open, exposing the bloody mess of palm beneath. Watching her work was calming, and I felt the thinnest thread of Fade energy seeping into my wrists from her fingertips. I took the hint, and used the power she gave me to heal myself.

“I do not know if he could be killed,” Gwen answered after seeing both my hands intact once more. “And frankly I am loathe to try. I believe he could be brought to understand the past is gone – long gone – and the hope for the future lies in repairing the world that rose in its ashes. If we are to recover from this… the Wardens’ betrayal, the aspirations of the Qun, the damage from the Breach, the dissolution of the Nevarran Accord… we need _allies_. We need to rebuild our world as one. He could play _such_ a role in that, if only he can be made to see reason.”

“We must agree to disagree,” I told her, pitching forward to lean against the war table. “He has no love for the elves as they have become, he sees them as _shemlen_ as much as they see the humans as such. So many things he said _make sense_ now. And that _fucking_ jawbone…”

I sighed and scrubbed a hand across my face, realizing a bit belated that I’d rubbed blood onto my nose and brow. I must look like Hawke. “He has the shards of his orb. Can he repair it?”

“I do not know. I do not think so.”

“Can he get into Skyhold via the eluvian?”

“Most likely,” Gwen admitted. “But he has likely already converted many elves to his cause. He will not need to come here on his own, as he will have no problem recruiting new agents.”

“Spies,” Leliana hissed. “May I look for them now?”

Gwen grinned at her. “Whatever you like, Most Holy.”

Leliana grunted, causing Cassandra, behind her, to raise an eyebrow in what seemed to me to be appreciation.

“They will not have Vallaslin,” Gwen said softly, and we all fell still. “He has a way to remove the slave markings, _freeing_ the elves from the Evanuris they unwittingly sold themselves to.”

“Why would he need to free them,” Josephine asked evenly, “if the Evanuris are banished to the Void?”

My stomach dropped even as Gwen gave voice to the obvious. “If he succeeds in bringing the Veil down, the Evanuris are freed.”

“Alright,” I said, taking over. “Cassandra, we need chairs. Josephine, get your board. We’re not leaving this room until we have a plan. Solas is _not_ freeing the Evanuris. He is _not_ bringing the Veil down. And we are getting his _fucking_ anchor off of my _fucking_ hand.”

“It is permanent,” Gwen reminded me softly. “Corypheus was a nutjob, but that much of what he told you was true. It is not coming off your hand for anyone less than Fen’Harel himself.”

Wisdom was agreeing with her, just like she always did, and I couldn’t quite squelch the bubble of resentment at having _his friend_ in my head.

_Mother saved me_ , the almost-imperceptible voice reminded me. Gwen bore her ultimate loyalty.

It was enough for me.

“Thank you,” I told the little Herald.

“You’re… welcome?” she asked, tilting her head to one side the way she did when she was confused. She was just like a fucking mabari sometimes.

No wonder Cullen was madly in love with her.

“For holding on to all of this until I was ready to hear it,” I clarified. “If you would have told me months ago, I could have let Solas die a thousand times over, and I’m actually pretty pissed at you for that. But it wouldn’t have meant anything to me then, and I want you to know I recognize how hard this must have been for you. You’ve been working to bring him into the fold this entire time and… I see it, Gwen. I just wanted you to know I see this for what it is, and I cannot honestly say you made the wrong decisions. You got us here, alive, intact, talking about the _after_. That was your job, and you performed it admirably.”

She reached out and wrapped her fingers around my thumb, her hands childlike against mine. “Thank you,” she whispered, her eyes practically dancing with relief and happiness.

“You’re still stuck in here with the rest of us until we figure this shit out.” I reminded.

She laughed and dropped into the chair Cassandra was pushing into place behind her. “I would have it no other way.”


	15. Time Travellers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a series of prompts: A moment in which they consider their future  
> Told from Hellen's POV  
> Technically occurs before the events of Keep to the Stars (but only by a couple days)

“Fuck you,” I panted, slogging through water that was knee-deep to _me_ and thus flatly unacceptable. “Fuck this. Fuck them. Fuck that creepy red lyrium _bullshit_. Fuck this entire fucking castle. Fuck Alexius. Fuck the Elder fuck. And Fuck _you_.”

“You mentioned that,” the Altus, Dorian, replied mildly.

“What?” I asked, pulling up to glare at him over the eerie red reflection of malevolent lyrium on putrid water.

“The _fuck me_ bit. You mentioned it previously. If you’re so hard up for breath, miss Herald, then you should conserve your assertions of fornication as much as possible. Maker only knows when you’ll need to tell a soldier to fuck himself, it would be a shame were you to run out.”

I stopped at the door and turned to glare at him. He had such an innocuous expression on his face, I almost couldn’t believe he was sassing me. Sassing _me_.

It had been an age since somebody had so blatantly _sassed_ me.

After a moment of meeting my gaze, he gestured rather extravagantly at the door. “Is there some invitation you’re expecting? Given the reaction those last two sods had upon seeing us, I presume we’re not on the _guest list_.”

Definitely sassing me. I grinned at him, and after a moment of surprise he grinned back. “I don’t know, Altus, should I knock first? Maybe give the poor bastards some warning that they’re about to get their asses handed to them?”

“Oh, by all means, let’s not be _sporting_ ,” he replied cheerfully. “There’s nothing I hate more than a fair fight.”

I was laughing, then, and leaned back to kick the door down, letting water pour out into the cavern beyond.

I was not laughing for long.

We found Sera and Bull not far from each other, twisted by the red lyrium and clearly at the end of their ropes. I broke into Fiona’s cell and put the Grand Enchanter out of her misery, sliding my belt knife between her ribs as my name fell from her lips in gratitude. We followed the sound of angry voices past a series of rooms bearing torture devices that even Bull shuddered away from, finally kicking open the door to Leliana hanging limply from the ceiling. On our entrance, she wrapped her thighs around her tormentor's throat and snapped his neck.

She had almost no words for me. There was an army of demons, she said, descending out of Orlais in the wake of Celene's assassination. The Elder One had swept across the world. The Breach had expanded, unchecked. 

It had only been a year.

We gathered up what weapons we could find without another word, the silence of my normally-effusive companions telling me more about the year they had lived than a thousand explanations could have dreamed to. Even Dorian’s sass was becoming thinner, harder, more bitter. He was watching Bull through narrowed eyes, but his expression was pained; this was a man seeing his enemy as a man.

Leliana stopped talking entirely and I gave her some time. We backtracked out of the prisons towards the main hall and _who the hell designed this shithole_? We ran across two patrols, but they were dead to a man before even realizing they were under attack. Then we stepped out into the open air and I saw the Breach for the first time, encompassing the entire sky when only a few hours prior I had seen it as barely a swirling storm cloud on the far western horizon.

It had only been  _a year_.

There was no more talking after that. Even Dorian’s sass dried up.

There was a fight. There was another fight. And the next. There was Alexius. There was the pendant.

There was no room for anything but the calm certainty that _this must never come to pass_.

I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Dorian as he worked furiously on the pendant. I watched Sera get torn in half by a Greater Terror. The Iron Bull swallowed back fear time and again to have his head twisted clear around by a Pride demon. Leliana held the line, firing arrow after arrow, knocking back demon after demon, the sounds of death and bowstring and claws lost in her resolute recitation of the Chant.

I put my hand to Dorian’s forearm as Despair took her, bowling her over and down and then she was overwhelmed.

Her eyes met mine as Dorian met success and the portal home roared to life behind me and I was drawn through. I saw the life leave her, and the expression on her face was _relief_. The world flared blue and the scene was wiped clean. I was facing the same direction in the same room, but the corpses of friend and foe were gone, the blood of man and demon missing, the smell of _ending_ replaced with incense and the dripping putrescence still clinging to my clothes.

Someone was talking. Maybe it was Dorian, rediscovering his sass in the face of Bull-who-is, rather than the Bull-who-was. It could have been Sera. I wasn’t paying attention.

There was no room in my head for anything but the pulsating cacophony of rage.

Alexius was broken. He stared at the pendant in his palm - the precise twin sitting in Dorian's hand - and it glowed faintly as he began to channel through it once more.

It was far too late for that.

I was only vaguely aware of the feel of his wrist bones as they shattered in my hand. My other hand closed around his opposite knee and I _squeezed_ , feeling his pulse race. I lifted him into the air, high over my head, and _pulled_ , snapping my arms open wide to either side. There was a glorious sort of _tear_ I could feel down my spine, across my shoulders and into my elbows, and then someone, somewhere, was screaming.

I dropped what was left of Alexius into a heap on the dais and turned my back on him, on Dorian, on Felix, on the entire fucked up Tevinter bullshit scenario. I had Fiona to face, knowing what it felt like to find her heart with my belt knife. I had to _negotiate_ like a rational being when all I could hear was fury, when I was coated in filth and death, when the taste in my mouth was _blood_.

Bull said something, and the part of me that stood firm against my nature, the small voice in the darkness that said _we are not this, we need not the Qun_ forced me to spin on my heel and confront him.

Between him and I, another portal had spun open. The world beyond was _white_ , impossibly clean lines and white spaces. There were curved, painted bits of glass and metal, and then there was a woman, falling from eye level to land on her head on the floor. Her eyes rolled up as she started to convulse, and I dove for her before I could consider my options. The years spent healing my mercenary family made the action a reflex.

Calm the nerves. Protect the brain. Steady the muscles. Breathe, little one, breathe.

The seizure stopped, and she curled around my knee on the floor, forehead tipped forward to rest against the water line left by Alexius’ dark future. Her hair was chestnut brown and carefully braided back, and there was not one blemish on her face, her skin seeming more like perfectly blended cream than a mortal's flesh. One glance at her was enough to guess she wasn’t from anywhere I’d ever heard of. There was a blue five-pointed design in a white circle on the ankles of her unfathomable shoes, and I kept my eyes to the stars while I let everything settle back into place.

With the future still heavy on my mind, it was easy to conclude that I was not the only woman to step backwards into the past this afternoon. Was it Alexius' doing, casting a spell to save himself? Had the power of the pendant gone wildly out of control and drawn someone else out of that dark future?

My only choice was to wait until she awoke, to speak for herself. Something about her was soothing, though; I couldn't put a finger on it, but I could almost feel the rage ebbing, dribbling out my fingertips at a faster rate the longer she was near me. This situation was impossible, this whole damn day was  _impossible_ ,  _she_ was  _impossible_ , but I watched her eyes twitching beneath her lids as she slept and I found I could tolerate the impossible.

“What will you say, little one?” I murmured in a voice too low to be heard over the total chaos swirling around me. Anora had just walked in with a full military escort, Fiona was arguing with the monarch, Dorian and Felix were still apoplectic over Alexius’ corpse, and Bull was trying to keep Sera from saying anything unforgivable to the Queen of Ferelden. “Will you bring me more tidings from the future? Or are you just as out of place in time as I was?”

I gathered her up, holding her close despite the accumulation of blood and fetid water clinging to my clothes, and I cradled her while I made a deal with Anora and Fiona. Her head rested against my shoulder as I walked out of Redcliffe castle and got us all rooms in the inn, got us all a bath and a bed and a single night of silence to adjust to the change in the world. I settled her across my lap for the long ride back to Haven with the mages at our back. I watched her sleeping eyes slowly sway back and forth as she drifted through the Fade and I wondered for the first time what my future would actually bring. 


	16. These Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gwen's POV  
> Contains major spoilers for Keep to the Stars... but seriously if you haven't finished Gwen's story by now, gtfo and go read it.

If I had looked at her then with the eyes I have now, I would have learned answers to questions I had never thought to ask, solutions to problems I didn’t realize existed.

She was a translator in DC, and lived halfway between the capital and Baltimore. She’d worked the weekend before and been given Friday off due to a freeze on overtime. She’d decided to go to the zoo for a quiet afternoon and was on the way home when the mushroom cloud appeared in her rearview mirror. She’d hurried home, locked herself in her house, and listened to the growing static on her radio as the world as she knew it fell apart.

She’d been filling her bathtub with water – thinking to shelter in place until the worst of the chaos was past and not thinking immediately of fallout – when the blonde had appeared in her hallway.

The roads were blocked. The radiation was descending. To flee was impossible and to stay was suicide.

Her name was Marian Ruess, and she took Andraste’s hand.

Her feet touched down in Dairsmuid. She was sent to a place where people knew her language, where the fact that she knew nothing about this new world would not hamper her navigating it. She would learn the new languages with ease there, and could find her way to the Herald when she arrived. She could help the Herald with the language, Andraste had told her – she could lead the Herald through this new world. Marian was blonde and fair, and stood out from the native Rivainis – but no more than the traders from Ferelden and Orlais in the port. There was a man there from the Anderfels who thought she was beautiful, and she wondered if she might have a future with him, where before she despaired of any future at all. He taught her the Common tongue and told her stories of the other lands he had visited. They made plans to travel to Kirkwall, where the Arishok was rumored to be shipwrecked and bilingual traders could make their fortune as middlemen between the Free Marchers and the Qun.

He told her that he loved her on the day the tamassran found her.

It was the focus on _purpose_ that brought her in, although she told herself she meant to learn more of this strange race who shared her language. She had always found a purpose in her work, and that it had followed her here, to a completely different world, was not lost on her. Even the task Andraste had given her – just a nameless blonde benefactor in Marian’s memory – was part of that purpose.

Take the words of one person and convert them to a form usable by another.  
Facilitate communication.  
Serve as a bridge.

She had always been awash in cultures and religions and races as she worked in one embassy or another. There was no religion Marian subscribed to, no set Dogma she adhered to. She prided herself on being open-minded and accepting of all different faiths.

When Marian asked the tamassran to teach her more about Koslun, the question she asked and the question that was answered weren’t precisely the same.

It was two weeks later that she announced she wasn’t going to Kirkwall.  
Three more weeks passed and she stopped speaking to the merchant from the Anderfels.  
Two weeks after that, she stopped leaving the compound the tamassrans occupied.  
Ten weeks after she asked the tamassran about Koslun, Marian Ruess stopped answering to that name.

If I had looked at her then with the eyes I have now, I never would have let her go.

She had never lost her purpose. She was still a translator. She was still helping people. She gave her eyes in the name of helping people from her homeland, whether she acknowledged the shared heritage or not. She did her best to save Jacqueline, and I learned – years later – that she had saved countless others from Gaspard. Granted, most of them were falsely accused Viddathari, but when she could, she led offworlders to freedom… until they took her eyes in retaliation.

Her name was Neria, and she served the Qun.

 

I never should have let her go.


	17. Letters to Mia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt/request on tumblr from [Sari Trevelyan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SariTrevelyan/pseuds/therutherfordwife)  
> Correspondence between Gwen and Cullen's sister Mia.  
> Set post-KttS

My Lady Murray,

                Please pardon my presumption; I sincerely hope I haven’t misunderstood my brother’s sentiments regarding you. If so, please, disregard this missive and never think on it again. I’ve never written a noblewoman before, so please forgive me if this is untoward or improper.

                I am Cullen Rutherford’s oldest sister, Mia. I’ve been married to a good man for some six years now, So my brothers and I no longer share a name, in case the signature at the bottom of this missive caused concern.

                If I may be blunt, Cullen has written of nothing but you in months, since you prompted him to inform me of the Inquisition’s movement to Skyhold and reassure me of his continued survival after the loss of Haven. For that, if nothing else, I feel I owe you my gratitude. I hope you take that, at least, from this letter. I have asked Cullen to pass my regards on to you, and to make the suggestion that you accompany him to South Reach when he finally makes the trip to visit his family. I have not seen my brother in many years, but I feel I still know him well enough to assume my invitations and overtures never reached you.

                I would very much like to meet the woman who has fundamentally changed my brother. Failing that, I would like to introduce myself and perhaps start a dialogue.

                Again, forgive my presumption if this correspondance is undesired. I try my best to read between the lines of Cullen’s letters, but getting him to tell me about anything beyond the superficial is like wringing blood from a stone.

Sincerely,

Mia Redwell

 

*

 

Dear Mia,

                Let us start this out on the right foot. Please, please, please, please, _please_ never call me _my lady_. Josephine insists on adding that to my name at every given opportunity but I am _not_ nobility. I have always worked for a living and I always will.

                I was overjoyed when I received your letter. I did not realize you even knew of my existence until fairly recently, and it is only now that the threat of Corypheus has been lifted (Cullen did tell you the war was over, I hope?) that we have been able to entertain thoughts of travel for leisure. I am admittedly very nervous to meet you, as Cullen’s memories of his family are practically sacred. Does Branson know that Cullen managed to smuggle that coin all the way through his time in the Templar Order? He tells me stories of practicing at chess until he could beat you, and the first book I read in Kingspeak was the primer he remembered from your own childhood.

                That said, I have written your language for less than a year and I am aware my handwriting is atrocious. If you do not mind, I would like to take this correspondance as a chance to practise. Thank you for taking the initiative to write me; I had no way to reach out to you without resorting to subterfuge.

Sincerely,

Gwen

 

*

 

Dear Gwen,

                Oh thank the Maker, Cullen found himself a real woman.

                I was so worried I was going to have to find a place for some Orlesian noblewoman to sleep when he finally brought her to visit. I tripled the number of geese we raised this summer, to be sure I had enough feathers to make a new mattress for the occasion. Not that you aren’t deserving of a new mattress, of course, but my own anxiety has just taken three huge steps backwards.

                Is it untoward if I start making demands with my second letter? I have so many questions. The things I know about you are all contextual. You make Cullen write to his family and assist his headaches, you are an advisor to the Inquisitor and you are referred to rather cryptically as the Herald of Andraste. But surely a clergy woman can’t be involved with a former templar? I’m going to feel terrible if I’m wrong, but the rumors we hear out here! There’s more news here than there ever was in Honnleath, but it’s almost always wrong. I want to know about you, and there’s no polite way to ask.

                I should add that I’m an open book, and anything you want to know I’m willing to share. Cullen has given some support to the rumor that they’re calling you a Seeress, so I don’t know if there’s anything about him and us you don’t know. I’ll tell you what I told him; if something happens to Cullen or the Inquisition and you need a place to go, my home is open to you.

Sincerely,

Mia

 

*

 

Dear Mia,

                I should start with some fair warning. Cullen walked in on me reading your last letter and was flustered to find we’d begun writing one another. If you haven’t heard from him yet, I suspect you will soon. To be fair, I was laughing aloud at the difference in tone between the first letter and the second. I am much more interested in the woman who wrote the second letter than the one who wrote the first.

                What do you want to know about me? I guess I can start with the things I would want to know, were I in your place. I am about the same age as your brother, I’m a widow, and I can’t bear children. So if you’re expecting your brother to settle down with me and provide you with nieces and nephews, I am going to disappoint you. My proper title is Chief of the Infirmary here at Skyhold, and I’ve worked as a healer for most of my adult life. The rumor that I am the Herald of Andraste is true, but I am not a member of the clergy. I avoid Val Royeaux as best as I am able. As you already guessed, I’m not the kind of person who needs a new mattress when they visit.

                You should know that I am in love with your brother. While our lives would all be improved if you and I could develop some positive sort of relationship, I should make it plain that there is nothing you, or anyone else, could say or do to separate me from Cullen. I want your kind regard, but I by no means require it.

                I apologize if that is too blunt for a second letter, but it’s the most fundamental thing you should know about me and how I relate to your life.

Sincerely,

Gwen

 

*

 

Dear Gwen,

                You have siblings, don’t you? You must.

                I didn’t know you were a widow; Cullen of course would leave everything personal out of his letters. That one piece explains so much… I am sorry for your loss. It is all too common these days, and I consider myself blessed to have avoided it. Since we’ve thrown all semblance of tact out the window, I’m surprised you’ve thrown your lot in with a soldier, given you’ve already lost one husband. I suspect that’s the reason it took so long for your relations to progress past strictly business; like I said, it explains a lot.

                I want to know what it means to be the Herald of Andraste. I want to know what your intentions are with Cullen, since marriage and a family don’t seem to fit your plans. Are you Orlesian? Are you settling in Val Royeax as a member of the Chantry? Is my brother going to move to Orlais to be with you? You say you avoid it as best as you are able, but that doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence.

                Will you tell me how my brother is doing? He seems different, since leaving the Templar Order, and I don’t know how much of that is your influence and how much of it is time. I would ask you to encourage him to write, but I suspect the reason I get as much correspondance from him as I do is from your influence.

                And, I hesitate to ask, but are you – is he – in any danger there? I know the war is over and the rebuilding has begun but Cullen won’t come out and say the trouble is past. I’m resigned to the fact that my brother will be in harm’s way for the majority of his life, but it was easier when he was a templar and I knew it was a calculated risk, something he had a genuine fighting chance to overcome.

                Reading over this letter, I realize I come across as awful demanding. I think, however, that you will understand the source of it and not take offense.

Sincerely,

Mia

 

*

 

Dear Mia,

                I had a brother. He was four years older than me, and one of my best friends. My best friend was like a sister, and was going to be adopted by my mother to make her my sister in truth, but she got sick suddenly and passed away when we were fourteen.  So, yes. I have siblings. And yes, I know where you’re coming from. I try to imagine our roles reversed, that I was writing to you about my brother, and I must admit you are probably being more tactful than I could manage. “Who the Void are you and why haven’t you hauled your ass down here and presented yourself to the family like a decent human being?” is more along the lines of what my stance would have been.

                That said, Inquisition Commander Cullen Rutherford of Skyhold and Gwendolyn Murray, the Herald of Andraste, hereby declare their intention to visit their presence upon you, some three weeks hence. That sounds ridiculous, but it’s what Josephine told me to write. Our retinue will be minimal, although I am forbidden from travelling without the Chargers so we will not be alone.

                We’ll find something for them to do in and around South Reach, don’t worry about them.

                At that time, I will sit down and I will look you in the eye and I will tell you everything I can about me, your brother, and our immediate futures. Please don’t hesitate to make a list, and we’ll work our way through it.

Sincerely,

Gwen 

P.S. I do not require a new mattress. Whatever you stick Cullen on will be good enough for me.

 

*

 

Dear Gwen,

                I’m not going to waste ink and paper when I’m going to see you before your response could arrive. I’ve passed the news around South Reach already, and there’s a board up in the town square of requests for your Chargers to look into while they’re here.

                I’ve only got one guest room. It’s yours. Stay as long as you can. We’ll see you soon.

Sincerely,

Mia


	18. To Silence Justice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A reader request.  
> The events of the garden, during the events of the Skyhold Rift and Hellen's final battle with Corypheus.  
> POV: Anders

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who asked for Anders' POV on the final battle with Corypheus?  
> I'll have to go look it up.

_Something is wrong_ , the rumble at the back of my head announced.

“You don’t say,” I sighed. I’d felt unsettled all morning. Hellen Adaar had taken her team to Haven the morning prior, and would be most of the way up the mountain by now, if not already embroiled in a battle with Corypheus.

“I didn’t say,” Hawke drawled idly. He was sitting stark-still, which was odd enough for him. I knew he was listening intently for any word from Merrill. Her phylactery was probably clenched in his hand as tightly as he could manage without shattering it. We had pulled a bench away from the wall on the terrace around the garden and had our feet up on the railing, right ankles crossed over the left. The mimicry was blatant, but we’d been doing it for so long we couldn’t help it anymore.

Our moods bled onto each other, like Justice’s thoughts into mine.

“Not you, stupid,” I replied with the same idle tone. Hawke should know, by now, who I spoke to.

Justice continued grumbling as I let my gaze wander through the garden before us. Alistair was sitting with Fiona and Morrigan’s son, Kieran, playing a very serious game with thick wooden cards in the grass. It was endlessly amusing to see the Grand Enchanter sitting cross-legged on the lawn. It was almost grandmotherly, if the word could be attached to her. Come to think of it, Kieran and Fiona did look-

_Something is very wrong. Can you not feel it?_

“Of course I can feel it,” I snapped back. “You know I can feel it. You’re in my bloody head.”

“Sorry?” Hawke asked, blinking.

“Is she alright?” I countered. Clearly his mind was elsewhere.

“She sounds… so bizarre, as a dragon. Her heart rate is so slow, and she can’t _speak_ to me through the phylactery, but somehow her thoughts are streaming through. Not every thought, though. It’s like they’re being filtered, somehow. I can’t put my finger on what the filter is.”

“So they’re already fighting?” I surmised.

“Oh. Oh, shit, yes,” Hawke chuckled. “She’s in dragon form and doing full aerial acrobatics. I am getting a flash every so often of the rest of the team. Most of them are keeping Corypheus contained, while the mages and archers are focusing on the false arch demon. When it hits the ground they-“

Hawke’s slightly dazed recounting of the battle happening to the south was completely lost as a thunderclap shook Skyhold.

“Maker! Shit piss fuck void take it-“ Hawke shot upright and the phylactery came out of his hands; he juggled it while spewing curses as the keep shuddered around us.

“Magic, idiot,” I gritted as I rose to my feet and tried to listen to everything at once. Alistair was unslinging his shield and keeping one hand to his sword in its scabbard, his head tilted as if he, too, was listening. I wondered how much his templar abilities were yet extant. He must hear the same lack of darkspawn as I did; our shared arch demon blood did us no favors in Skyhold. Was that a phylactery he had in his hand, like Hawke?

Fiona had risen and put her hands on Kieran’s shoulders, and I saw the sharp blue of her barrier spring up around Kieran… and Kieran alone. She was putting every ounce of her mana into protecting Morrigan’s son? Her face was briefly an open book, the fear and protectiveness shooting across it, and the family resemblance between her and the child was suddenly unmistakable.

 _It is a rift!_ Justice howled and I grabbed up my staff from where it leaned against the railing as Hawke created a minor gravity field in his hand to steady the phylactery.

“Put it away,” I told him harshly. “You’ve got problems of your own.”

Garrett took the time to hang the phylactery around his head by its fine silverite chain and tuck the wire-wrapped crystal into the collar of his shirt before hefting his own staff.

“Sorry,” he grunted. “It won’t happen again.”

A stream of green Fade energy appeared over the edge of the wall, and after a moment a Terror Demon rose up, glaring balefully down into the garden.

Alistair’s sword whipped out of his scabbard.

The noncombatants – the Tranquil, the gardeners, the alchemists and off-duty staff – fled indoors quickly. It didn’t seem like they were making much noise in their retreat.

“Not at this rate,” I agreed, and we ran off to stand at either of Alistair’s flanks.

“Get Kieran back!” Alistair called over his shoulder to Fiona.

“You need my aid!” Fiona argued as Kieran stepped forward. “I will not run!”

The terror demon dropped into the garden and Alistair bellowed something I’d heard a hundred times from a dozen mouths. I didn’t know if the particular brand of syllables worked as a taunt on demons as well as it did on darkspawn, but Warden warriors learned it almost as soon as they awoke from their Joining.

The demon drew up on itself and disappeared into the earth.

“Kieran! Move! That is an _order_!” Alistair bellowed. The three of us scattered, so we couldn’t all be taken out simultaneously by the resurgence of the demon. I got a clear view of Kieran sweeping up Fiona’s hand and racing with her to another part of the garden.  The barrier around him was the brightest I had ever seen. Beads of sweat had popped up on Fiona’s brow.

The ground stayed intact beneath Fiona and Kieran. Alistair was practically dancing from side to side, so as not to be in the same place.

I met Hawke’s eyes.

The demon erupted from the ground.

Hawke went down, the Terror descending claws-first.

The darkspawn taunt wasn’t an effective as we hoped.

Alistair charged across the intervening space as I cast the demon into winter’s grasp. It was a resilient bastard – the chill that had killed red templars so reliably in the Arbor Wilds merely slowed it down. I was helpless to stop the double-handed puncture of Hawke’s abdomen.

And Hawke, prick that he is, let it happen.

“Maker, not again,” I groaned as I raced to my foolhardy friend’s side.

Garrett had, true to form, sought out a source of blood. Now that he had it, the demon was well and truly fucked. It was launched back across the garden, an explosion of fire and gore, rolling to a rough halt at Alistair’s feet, forcing the warrior to stutter-step to the side. I ran past Alistair – trusting him to be able to impale a stunned and staggered demon – and slid the final few feet to Hawke’s side on my knees.

“You damn fool,” I sighed as I saw the mess the demon had made of my best friend’s abdomen. The large intestine was exposed in four different places, and three of those were notably punctured. He was practically guaranteed to get a fever from this.

Assuming, of course, he didn’t bleed out on the spot.

“He went down quick,” Alistair said, coming to stand over Hawke as I worked. “I’ve never had one go to goo that quickly before, even with Hellen around.”

“You hear that, Hawke?” I gritted.  “New record. You beat Hellen. That means you can stop pulling this trick.”

“What?” he coughed, in mock outrage. A bit of blood colored his lips and I changed my focus from his intestine to his lungs, and bent my focus to sealing his wounds. “Let you get out of practice? Preposterous. You need this to keep in shape.”

“Of course, you’re doing it for _him_ ,” Alistair chuckled. “Maker, you sound like Solona sometimes.”

“Well, rumor has it we’re related,” Hawke replied. His voice was stronger now, and I shifted back to his abdomen, having found and sealed the puncture to his lung.

“He needs a healing potion if you have one,” I told Alistair as I worked. “And some antivenom as quickly as possible. The poison is already in too deep.”

“Aren’t you just little miss sunshine?” Hawke chuckled weakly as I sealed the skin over his now-intact abdominal muscles. “I bet you could get it if you worked a bit, slackass.”

“There’s a rift open, twit,” I retorted. “And Hellen’s half a day’s journey away and fighting Corypheus at the moment. I’d rather save the magic and make you drink some antivenom.”

“Rift?” Hawke demanded, sitting up. “When did you say it was a rift? Where’s the rift?”

“It was Justice,” I replied, mentally calling the spirit to chime in. “He told me it was a rift.”

“We’ll have to evacuate,” Alistair decided, looking around for Kieran and Fiona, his face softening – only briefly – to see them safe, near the wall of the keep. Fiona was looking a bit worse for wear, and the barrier around Kieran had faded a bit now that the immediate danger had passed.

I didn’t really want to think about the sort of power it took to keep a barrier up for that long.

“Does Justice know where the rift is?” Hawke prompted.

“Does he?” I echoed when the spirit didn’t immediately reply.

I was met with silence.

“Anders?” Hawke asked. He took a health potion from Alistair and drank it in one long pull, setting the empty flask into the grass and never looking away from my face. “Anders, what is it? What does he say?”

“Nothing,” I admitted. “He’s not saying anything.”

Alistair and Hawke blinked at me simultaneously. “Has he ever done that before?”

“Shut up?” I shook my head. “Never. Not even once, not even if I begged.”

“But he can’t-“

“Leave?” I cut off Alistair’s question. “No. No, he’s there. He’s just… silent.”

“What does he feel like?” Hawke asked, sliding forward to peer into my face, as if he could see Justice inside my eyes. “Does he feel like he’s awake?”

I leaned away from Hawke and closed my eyes, focusing on Justice in a way I hadn’t done in years, not since our bond was new and I was still exploring its limits, trying to find where I ended and the spirit began.

“He’s sad,” I answered, the words popping from my mouth and not really processing until I thought of what I’d heard my own voice say. “Devastated, even.”

“Because of a rift?” Alistair asked. He was doing another circuit with his eyes, spinning slightly in place to watch for the next demon to spawn.

There’d been only one demon. A rift had spawned, the keep had felt like it was spinning apart, and Hellen was still a day’s ride away, it could not have _closed_ …

“Oh no,” I breathed, realizing far too late what might have closed the rift and put Justice into mourning. I pushed to my feet, fear causing a surge of adrenaline to combat the weariness of healing the devastating injuries Hawke had sustained. “Oh, no, please, no.”

“Gwen?” Hawke asked, reaching the conclusion a moment later, surging to his feet and then pitching over, still exhausted from blood loss and mana expenditure. Alistair pivoted smoothly to catch him before he tumbled back to the ground.

The breach detonated, spectacularly, then, spinning us all around to face the south.

“Is it over?” Kieran’s voice, carrying easily over the sudden silence, asked Fiona.

“I believe it is, child,” the Grand Enchanter answered softly.

“What about Gwen?” Alistair demanded. “What does this have to do with her?”

“Go,” Hawke ordered, and I didn’t stand around for a discussion. I found myself running towards the main hall, where last I had seen her. As I begged Justice to tell me what was happening, pleaded with him to tell me I was wrong, Hawke began to fill in Alistair about the dangers of Gwen confronting a rift.

“We’ve theorized that Gwen could close them,” he summarized bluntly. “But doing so would kill her.”

“Ser!” A soldier nearly ran into me as I charged through the doorway into the keep. “Ser! Anders, ser! Commander Cullen has sent for you!”

“Void take your Commander,” I said, pushing past him. “I need to find the Herald.”

“He has the Herald, ser!” the soldier amended, stopping me in his tracks. “Caught her as she fell out of the air, he did. Sent for you right away.”

I swallowed back the surge of fear at his words. “Lead away,” I managed to croak. With a sharp nod, the soldier broke into a run, leading me in the direction I had already been headed.

We ran into the main hall and through it to the big double doors. My attention was caught as soon as I emerged back into the sunlight by a gathering of people near the doors. Cullen and Leliana were kneeling in the dust of the courtyard, heads bent and bodies curled around a third person.

…a person laying limply in Cullen’s arms, immobile, wearing unmistakable black-and-white shoes.

The soldier who’d summoned me was already five steps down, and I plunged down the staircase behind him. I jumped off the side of the staircase halfway down, overtaking him, and almost fell down the second staircase in my haste.

My only conscious thought was a prayer.  
_Be breathing_ , I begged the Maker I had long since stopped talking to. _Please let her be breathing_.


	19. Escape: Finn Cousland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story of how the younger child of Bryce and Eleanor Cousland escaped the taking of Highever by Arl Howe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of a short series of "escape" stories I want to tell, accounting for the continued existence of the alternate Origins. It was always very interesting for me, to find the bodies of the people who could have been my Warden but were not: Broska in the jail, Aeducan in the Deep Roads, mention of Mahariel, the whole Unrest in the Alienage quest line... they're there. They lived, whether they were the PC or not. And some of them... well, just as they could have survived to become The Warden, many of them managed to survive without Duncan's assistance.  
> (Note: I could NOT think of a good way to save Mahariel. Dead Dalish elf, sorry.)  
> This is very heavy influenced by [Eisen's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisen) story, Fate or Chance.
> 
> *
> 
> In other news: after three long years, my mom has successfully purchased a home and will be moving out of my house. I love her... I will love her more when she lives 15 miles away. :-D  
> I got caught up in painting her new place (we did literally the entire dwelling in one day) and lost track of days. Sorry the update is late!

Dairren never came.

Granted, it had always been a feint. He knew I wasn’t interested in men, and I knew he bragged to his friends about _that girl in Highever_. His mother always noticed he wasn’t in his rooms at night, and fed into his reputation by yelling at him – frequently and publicly – about showing some restraint in the Cousland home.

I’d explained the whole thing to Da once. When he finally stopped laughing, he made Dairren his squire.

With Arl Howe in residence, I was a little surprised when Dairren agreed so readily to our usual midnight rendezvous.

That surprise was nothing to waking up with Pouncer living up to her name, crouched down by my bedroom door, poised to strike. She’d just weaned her puppies and needed some extra bonding time with people, so I was keeping her out of the kennel for a few weeks, until the alpha bitch – Alfie – had gotten over her most recent heat. As it stands, my soft spot for the youngest bitch probably saved my life that night.

I rolled out of bed, grasping my shield and longsword from where they dangled, ever ready, on the hinge side of the door. I grasped the knob, turned, and rolled into the hall.

An arrow thudded into the wood, right where my torso would have been should I have exited with any dignity. Pouncer was mauling the archer before I was upright, the residual maternal instinct making her more aggressive than normal. There were two other intruders in the hallway – both brandishing bloodied swords as they tried to force open my parents’ door.

I could warn them of the foolishness in attacking the teryn and teryna – my mother could outmatch six armed men in her heyday, which honestly wasn’t completely behind her – but instead I snuck up behind them and systematically ran them through.

“Finlay?” My mother, the teryna, called. “Finlay, is that you?”

“Yes, Ma, let me in.” As she worked the tumblers I turned to whistle for Pouncer, only to find the mabari trotting over to me, blood-coated teeth and tongue exposed in a lolling smile.

“Did you get him, girly? Did you? Such a good lady.”

My mother swung open the door and then immediately went back to belting on her plated leather armor. “Your father never came to bed,” she told me shortly. “He stayed up when Rendon, like he does. Check on Oren and his mother-“ she hadn’t ever really accepted my brother Fergus’ Antivan wife “-and then come with me to find your father and take stock of the damage.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I’ll tell you when I get a look at these two,” she said, jerking her chin at the corpses on her fine Tevinter rug as she strapped on her paired sword and dagger. “And don’t forget pants, Finlay love.”

I snorted and then turned and trotted over to Fergus’ room, where Oriana and Oren were, hopefully, yet asleep through a bungled assassination attempt.

The door was open, and my heart leapt into my throat.

I pushed at the door, peeking around, and then quick snapped it shut.

“Finlay!” my mother called, the horror in her voice matching what I knew to be painted across my face. “Finlay, these are _Howe’s men_. Rendon… how could he…”

“Oren and Oriana… Mother, they’ve… they got to them first.”

“What?” My mother gasped, surging to her feet. “Oren? No!”

She staggered to their door. I turned and darted back into my room, and flew into my armor as quickly as I could manage.

She was wiping the last tear from her face and setting her jaw when I reemerged into the hallway.

She looked as if she was going to say something – but then the first plume of smoke sailed into the hallway from the open door leading down into the rest of the castle.

There was no more time for words. I led the way down the stairs – shield front, sword drawn – with my mother on my heels and Pouncer, with the best senses, protecting our rear.

Highever was burning.

There was fighting everywhere. Most of our standing militia had gone to Ostagar already, meaning Howe’s men outnumbered us ten or twelve to one. That we weren’t overrun meant the doors had gotten closed, and the fire was being sent in by trebuchet or arrow to smoke us out. Mother and I fought through to the main hall, where Gilmore was holding the doors.

I jumped into the battle, slaying the last of the invaders while Mother and Gilmore conferred. When the room was secure, and the halest of our soldiers were moving everything not nailed down to barricade the door, I took my own turn with Ser Gilmore.

“Where did the teryna go?” I asked in lieu of a greeting.

“Your lady mother went to see about your father. Last I knew, he was trying to secure the kitchen. I didn’t think anyone else knew of that entrance, but he seemed unsure of whether Howe had heard of it.”

“Beautiful,” I sighed. “Alright. I am going to check the kennel, make sure there’s no fire there, and then meet my parents at the larder. You are to pull back and continue laying barricades and traps through the keep. We can’t hold out against the Howes forever.”

‘With all due respect, it is my duty to-“

“It is your duty to follow an order, Ser Gilmore,” I cut him off. “And dying in a lost cause at the front door is not an option.”

He had more to say, but I couldn’t stand the idea of the mabari burning alive in their kennels, so I fled down the hall rather than wait around and see if I was obeyed.

The fire had not reached the kennel yet, but most of our fighters had gone with Fergus to Ostagar, so there were not many dogs to free. I ran a tether around all of Pouncer’s pups – weaned but awkward – and whistled for the rest of them to heel. Alfie was at my side in a heartbeat, and Pouncer hard to the other.

Any animosity in the kennel was forgotten in war. The dogs knew the smell of blood and fire.

I checked one of the side doors to the main hall, pleased to find it well trapped and barricaded. Howe would lose a hundred men when he breached the door, and the next hundred would proceed with caution.

Gilmore was waiting in the kitchen with a scant dozen men – the only ones healthy enough to attempt an escape. The rest were laying other traps and ambushes, and would sell themselves to ensure the family’s retreat. “I should be with them,” Gilmore said.

“You should be with my parents,” I countered. “They’re not getting any younger.”

“Finlay!” my mother called out in horror, for the second time that night. I swept past Gilmore into the larder…

…to find my father bleeding out on the floor.

“Da!”

“Pup,” he coughed. “Thank the Maker. How many of the mabari did you get?”

“Bryce, really?” my mother chided. “Your grandson is dead, your daughter in law is dead, your home is lost, your oldest friend has betrayed you, and you’re asking about your _dogs_?”

“I emptied the kennel, Da,” I answered, not quite drumming up enough amusement to grin sideways at my mother. “Even Pouncer’s pups.”

“That’s my girl. Now get them free. Get as many men as you can, and get to Fergus. Tell him… he’s the teryn now.”

“Da, no-“

“I’m off to join Finnegan with Oren,” he said calmly. “I’m already cold, I’m out of options and nearly out of time. Do me this one kindness and swear to me you will leave Highever tonight and not stop running until you find your brother.”

“I swear, Da,” I promised, the words burning as they left my tongue. “I will not stop until I find Fergus and we will make him teryn. Cailan’s at Ostagar, we can-“

“Go,” my mother interrupted, her eyes glued to her husband’s face. “Go, right now. I have to move your father so we don’t give up the location of the exit. _Go_.”

“Eleanor, you have to-“ my father weakly protested, but I could not stay to listen.

I wanted my mother to come with me, but the oath I had made my dying father would not be set aside. I whistled for Alfie, the three-burst command that said _bring the pack_. Shortly the room was full of mabari, Gilmore being dragged in by the tethered pups I had surreptitiously leashed him to.

“Gilmore, guard my daughter,” my father ordered.

“Yes, ser,” Gilmore answered. He called what men he had – another two immediately opted to stay behind with my mother, to help her move the teryn and then, hopefully, make their escape.

“Am I waiting for you?” I asked my mother, as Gilmore’s men filed out through the secret passage.

“You are not,” my mother said. And, as if realizing what she said, she threw herself across the room and wrapped me in a hug. “Give my love to your brother. Tell him… tell him I’m sorry we… we failed to protect his family.”

“He will forgive you, Ma. The blame here falls on Howe’s shoulders.”

She nodded once, sharply, and then kissed me on the forehead – bestowing her blessing. I knelt at my father’s side, giving and receiving the same gesture.

“I love you, Da,” I said. “I love you, Ma.”

“We love you,” my father breathed, his face pale and head leaning limply on my mother’s knee. “Keep the name alive, Fin.”

The diminutive brought a lump to my throat, and I barely managed to raise my sword in salute before whistling for Alfie to bring the pack and ducking into the secret passage. My mother, calling her love down the tunnel to me, slammed the door in place.

“Why would the teryna not come?” one of Gilmore’s men – my men, now – asked when I caught up to them in a landing of sorts, a gathering hall halfway between the portal in the larder and the free air of the countryside.

“She and my father married young,” I told him, jerking my head to indicate they should fall into step behind me. “They’ve been inseparable for decades. She told me once that she took up the sword so she could go with him into battle against Orlais. She will live with him, or she will die with him. Howe will not take her alive.”

“So the teryn…”

“The teryn is a day’s march ahead of us,” I said dryly, “heading hard for Ostagar.”

“Maker,” Gilmore breathed. “You’re stone cold, Finlay.”

“Fin,” I corrected him, and he went silent.

They _stayed_ silent until we reached the hidden exit, buried in a deep ravine between the cliff Highever castle sat upon and the beginning of the hills running to the west. I sent Alfie on ahead, Pouncer being the better guard of the group since we had her six pups with us. Alfie returned minutes later, tail wagging encouragingly, and I followed her out of the brush.

We walked in silence until dawn, and then just kept walking. We angled more West than south, knowing Howe would expect us to head straight for Ostagar and not wish to be caught between the ocean and his scouts. Most of the Highever boys knew of a short cut through the hills that would let us out on the North Road half a day’s run from West Hill, and we all headed unerringly for that route. Even if Howe or one of his soldiers knew of the shortcut, they wouldn’t know it as well as us, and it would be suicide to try to sneak up on a dozen soldiers and twice as many mabari.

Even if six of them were pups, barely off the teat.

At midday we reached a cave system that was easily defended and difficult to see. We moved into it and agreed to sleep until nightfall, to keep moving under cover of darkness. We would have the advantage of terrain, comfort, and preparation regardless, but moving at night would keep us ahead of any force seeking to overtake us.

“I can’t call you Fin,” Gilmore announced, breaking the silence when we’d set camp as well as we were able. I sent Alfie and four of the males out hunting, and hoped they’d bring back a ram or two for us to share.

“You have to,” I replied. I saw fully half my men – and they were all men, not one of the female soldiers had made it out alive – shaking their heads, _no_.

“I _can’t_ call you Fin,” Gilmore repeated, and his voice nearly broke.

“It was the last thing Da said,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from wavering. As long as I focused on the task at hand I could keep it together; thinking about my parents dead in a burning Highever castle was not something I could do and maintain command. These men – _my men_ , my friends, my lifelong companions – needed to hear my reasoning, though, so I clenched my teeth and brought it out. “He said, _keep the name alive, Fin_.”

Three of them recoiled as if struck. Gilmore leaned his head into his hands.

“He didn’t mean the Cousland name,” I continued, repeatedly swallowing back the lump in my throat. “Maker knows we’ll have to work at that, too, with Oren… Oren dead. But he didn’t say _Cousland_ , he didn’t say _Pup_ , he said _Fin_. And I am going to take him at his word.”

“What good will that do?” one of them – Kinmer, his name – asked.

It was a valid question. When we’d been children, my twin and I were indistinguishable. My hair was cut short, we wore the same clothes, we were the same height and weight and build and always unfathomably filthy. When implicating one or the other of us in a crime, the household staff had taken to simply insisting, _Fin did it_. It was either Finnegan or Finlay and in the end it was probably both.

We’d both gone by _Fin_ for most of my life.

The older we got, the sicker Finnegan had become, making our sizes always roughly equal. I had stayed relatively flat and curveless, and he had slowly wasted away. His heart had simply stopped two years ago, the night before Fergus’ birthday.

No one had said _Fin_ since. I was Finlay to the staff or _Pup_ to my parents and Fergus.

Bringing back the name did nothing but hurt.

Unless…

“I’m going by Finnegan from here out,” I told Ser Gilmore.

“You’re not serious.”

“We never talked about Finnegan dying,” I said, holding out my hand and starting to tick points off on my fingers. “It was whispered about that _one of the Cousland twins_ had died of a mysterious illness, but we were too wild to be out of the house much. Nobody could tell us apart. No one has been to Highever to visit my parents since Finn died - well, except Howe - and there was never a public proclamation. Da meant to do it at the next Landsmeet, to give my mother some time to heal before trying to talk about it in public.  Even if someone remembers it was the boy and not the girl who died, we can tell them they remembered wrong. If _Howe_ counters it… well. I rather intend to kill him, regardless.”

Gilmore huffed an emotionless sort of laugh. “But why? Why resurrect his ghost?”

“Because it’s safer if I’m not a girl,” I said softly, and they all went still.

“No one would-“

“You can’t say that,” I countered, and Gilmore fell silent. “Da said he caught word from Duncan that this is a _Blight_. Darkspawn kill men and steal women, if I’m going to Ostagar to find Fergus-“

“No more of that train of thought,” Kinmer protested with a shudder. The man next to him, one of the older men-at-arms, Thatcher, voiced a similar plea.

“And I’m not… Gilmore, you at least know, I’ve never been… _interested_ … in men.”

He snorted again. “Despite all your ploys to the contrary.”

“So, best case scenario, we all survive this, Fergus takes back Highever, and I get married off to some nice girl somewhere who doesn’t want a man as badly as _I_ don’t want a man. It’s the only way that sort of thing happens in a noble family. Women who like women don’t get to marry for love. Don’t tell me that’s not what happened to Anora. And we all know about Celene and that elf broad. If I crop my hair short and hide my throat and rough up my edges and you all call me Finnegan, I’ll be Finnegan.”

I shifted on the tree stump I had claimed as a pillow, although it was currently a chair. “And, worst case scenario, maybe I confuse the darkspawn and they kill me. Maybe I confuse some brigands and they kill me. Maybe I don’t live but I don’t get raped and demeaned before I get killed. You guys didn’t see Oriana’s body… I just… I can’t begin to…”

“It won’t happen to you, Fin,” Gilmore said softly. “None of us will let you come to harm.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Ser Gilmore.” Somewhere distant - maybe a mile off to the west - a braying of a hound announced a triumph over hunger. 

“Any time, my Lord,” he answered evenly. “Now. Alfie’s calling a success. What say you we cook up a haunch and then let the dogs keep watch?”

“I think I’ll sleep now and claim some leftovers,” I replied. Gilmore stood, tousled my hair, and then moved off to organize the ten men who had followed us and the swirling mass of mabari who would never listen to him as well as they did me.

I couldn’t help but relax some of the tension I was carrying, knowing Gilmore had my back. I was asleep within moments, my last thoughts of my brothers.


	20. Escape: Kaiopi Surana (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Contains Spoilers for Will to Live)  
> This is the first part of a two-chapter ficlet, explaining how Opie got out of the Circle.

She was leaving.

Maker’s breath, she was _leaving_.

I stood at the top of the stairs, drawn by the commotion outside the apprentice dormitories, and watched as Knight-Commander Gregoire and First Enchanter Irving fought over the fate of my oldest friend.

Jowan’s dabbling in blood magic was shocking, but not unbelievable. The idea that Solona had helped him destroy his phylactery was inconceivable.

Maker, if only I had not yet been Harrowed, and my phylactery was in such easy reach of my friend.

Warden Commander Duncan was telling her to gather up her things, which just that afternoon had been moved out of the apprentice quarters. I raced up the stairs so that I could be in her room when she arrived, so I could steal five last minutes with my oldest – only – friend.

“Opie!” she cried as she burst into the room. Solona had always lived on the outside of her skin, and this moment was no different. Every thought that ran through her head was broadcast on her face. She was elated, terrified, shocked, enraged, anxious, and already desperately lonely. “Oh, Opie, I’ve been conscripted. I was just doing what First Enchanter Irving told me to do, and Gregoire-“

“I heard, Loner, I heard,” I said, as soothingly as possible, as she darted across the room and threw herself into my arms. “I was standing at the top of the stairs, I heard everything.”

“What am I going to _do_?”

“Live,” I answered immediately, seeking a silver lining and not having to look very hard. “Breathe the free air. Look at the _stars_. Empty your bladder without a templar looking over your shoulder. Take this for the gift it is, _shem_.”

She leaned back and blinked at me. “It should be you. You should be leaving, not me. Maybe Duncan could take us both?”

I shook my head. “Irving would not let us both go. He’s invested too much time in us.”

Solona sighed and slumped against my shoulder.

“Come on,” I encouraged, “let’s get you packed before Gregoire changes his mind.”

“Maker forbid,” Solona shuddered, and pulled away.

We had all her things – mostly writing supplies and spare clothes – tucked into a painfully small backpack within minutes. Duncan had given her two packs – perhaps a Senior Enchanter, like Wynne, would need more luggage, but Solona had only just escaped the apprentice quarter. Even one more week would have doubled her gear, as a Harrowed mage was trusted with things like personal affects.

“Take the other one,” Solona said, thrusting the empty pack into my hands. “Hide it. Quickly. Go!”

I stumbled away from her in a daze, lifting up a heavy foot locker and laying the pack flat beneath. “Loner, why-“

“Duncan won’t say anything. He won’t think to, not until we’re on the road. Use it. My leaving will have the place in an uproar, you can slip out if you’re careful.”

“Loner, no, I-“

“Talk to Anders, he’ll know what to do. Nobody’s figured out how he got out the last two times. Catch up to me on the road, I’ll protect you. I’ll conscript you if I have to.”

“Loner, no. I can’t. They’ll make me Tranquil.”

“You’re Harrowed. They can’t.” She surged across the room, grabbing my shoulders and _shaking_ me. “Stars, Kaiopi. _Stars_. I don’t remember them, I’ve been here too long. Don’t let that happen to you. Get outside.”

“They’re sending the Senior Enchanters to Ostagar, I could-“

“You could use that as a cover to escape, as well,” Solona gritted. “At least promise me you’ll talk to Anders.”

“I’ll talk to him, Loner, I will.”

A knock on the door drove us apart. “Enchanter Amell? It is past time we were going.” Duncan’s mellow voice drifted through the door.

“I’m coming, Warden Commander,” Solona called back.

His laugh was immediate and warm. “Just Duncan is fine.”

She shouldered her pack and slipped into the hall, keeping me concealed behind the heavy door. “Then I must insist you call me Solona, Duncan.”

“I think that could be agreeable,” he replied, his voice diminishing as they moved towards the stairs.

I had never considered escaping the Tower. Kinloch had been my home for a decade; I only remembered my sister because she wrote once a year, on Satinalia. Beyond her, I considered my family to be the mages here, from Irving to Loner and everyone in between. I staggered out of the room that had, for one bright beautiful shining day, been my dream come true: a private suite with my best friend.

I stumbled directly into Ser Cullen.

“Oh, Andraste’s- Kaiopi! Thank the Maker, I found you.”

“Let me watch her go,” I begged, grasping the neck of his armor. “Cullen, please, just one minute at the window, just one, _please_.”

“Kaiopi,” he protested softly, detaching my hands from him. “Kaiopi, no, stop. There are others looking for you. Concerns… Well. With Solona gone there were worries that your behavior would shift. Pull yourself together, or they’ll think you another Jowan.”

Had someone overheard Solona? I straightened up and took a quick step away. My cheeks were wet but I ignored the tears as best as I was able. I was too familiar with Cullen, too comfortable. Too many weeks of stolen moments in corners and behind stacks in the library had lulled me into complacency.

He was one of _them_ , still.

A Templar. Like those who punished their own for being betrayed by a blood mage and threatened a Harrowed mage for following the First Enchanter’s direct order. And in this, the first time I ever asked him for anything _for me_ , to help with this one thing, one brief moment to see off my friend, he had underhandedly accused me of being _maleficar_.

“Thank you, ser Cullen,” I managed, and turned on my heel to return to the library, to my studies. “I appreciate the reminder of where I stand.”

“Kaiopi… Enchanter Surana, wait. I did not mean – blast it.”

I did not outpace him – Templar weren’t looked at twice for running, while even a brisk walk was frowned upon for mages – but I did ignore him until he gave up the chase. He had someplace to be, after all; someplace that did not involve warning me about the immediate shift in opinion about me amongst his brethren. I was alone in the hallway for all of two minutes, still not returned to the library, when a hand shot out of a darkened doorway and dragged me out of sight.

“Kiss me for luck, Opie,” Anders breathed.

Once I overcame my fright, I leaned my forehead against his shoulder and laughed silently. “Because of course you’re using Solona’s conscription to make another escape attempt.”

“They might not even realize I’m gone –“

“They will _immediately_ realize you’re gone,” I countered. “They’re already looking to me to make an attempt.”

Anders snorted. “You would never…” he started to scoff, and then thought better of it. “Opie. Opie, that’s it. That’s what will get me – get _us_ – out of here.”

“Why does everybody want me to leave the Circle?” I hissed below my breath. “What is wrong with the Circle?”

“How long after Solona left were you on your own before they started giving you the side-eye?” Anders countered. “She hasn’t even cleared the lake yet, and already they’re looking to you to run?”

“How do you know she hasn’t cleared the lake?” I retorted.

“I know how to look,” he replied easily. “Come on.”

There were three narrow, dusty passageways in the back of the library stacks that stood between me and a final view of my friend, by way of a poorly repaired shutter on a relatively low-hung window. Anders laced his fingers together and gave me a boost to where the cracked wood afforded a view towards the docks that connected Kinloch to the mainland.

There was a tiny boat most of the way across the water – far enough that I couldn’t make out anything about its occupants beyond what my imagination supplied. The dark spot that might have been Solona and might have been Duncan could only hold my attention for the space of time it took me to accept I couldn’t make out their features.

There was a stiff breeze blowing out of the east, and it lifted my hair away from my face. It smelled of fish and summer and sunlight and for one perfect moment I shut my eyes and remembered what it was to be _outside_.

I took a short, shuddering breath, and stepped off Anders’ hands.

“I had forgotten wind,” I admitted. “Maker forgive me, Anders, I forgot how the wind smelled.”

“If we both go, we might both get away,” he whispered, pulling me back through the library, heading towards the grand hall for dinner before we could be missed. “When I come for you, be ready.”

His hand came free of mine and he was gone.

I exchanged pleasantries with him over the evening meal, as per our usual, and then made it a point to sit with the rest of my peers. I was friends with exactly none of them. Niall was gone to Ostagar with Wynne, and Solona had not gotten dinner as a full Enchanter, having only passed her Harrowing the night before. I had sat with her and Jowan as apprentices; now I needed to make new friends as if those two had never existed.

Or, at least, I needed to act like I would.

I presented myself to Irving’s office for our typical evening lesson. I had earned the title of Enchanter, so I was no longer his pet apprentice; instead, I was undertaking special training. He had meant for Solona and I to learn his job, to be prepared to step into his shoes when he was finally ready to retire. So many of the Senior Enchanters had either refused or proved unfit; I had taken to it like a fish to water and loved the idea of one day being a First.

I was not Dalish, but the title sang to something deep in my soul.

I left with a week’s worth of homework, as he’d lost years of work invested into Solona in an instant when Duncan invoked the Right of Conscription. I waddled to the library with four heavy tomes suspended on arms too short to carry them and a stubborn streak too wide to admit it.

“You’ll hurt your elbows again,” a familiar voice said at my shoulder, and I sighed as Cullen appeared and lifted three of the four books out of my hands. “Where are you off to?”

“My usual corner of the library, Ser Cullen,” I answered cooly.

The junior templar made an exasperated sort of sound, but kept his voice even. “I’m sorry about earlier. I know Amell was your best friend and she… it could not have been easy for you to lose her so soon after her successful Harrowing. You did not need to worry about suspicion at that time. I should not have mentioned it.”

Always before I would have heard the apology and it would have been enough.

Tonight, though, with the memory of a warm breeze on my face and the bitterness of going a decade without seeing the stars fresh in the forefront of my mind, I heard everything he did not say.

_You have done nothing to earn their suspicion._

_You are not Jowan._

_You would never turn to blood magic._

_You deserve better_.

All the things I would have said to Anders, to Solona, to _Jowan_ even, if they stood in my shoes, he would not say to me.

Suddenly, Anders could not come for me soon enough.

“Thank you, Cullen,” I whispered instead. “I am… sad, that she is gone. We were to have such a grand future together, under Irving’s tutelage. I must work harder for him, to make up for her loss. Forgive me; I would like to be by myself tonight.”

“I will see to it you are not bothered,” he replied, setting my books onto a study carousel as we arrived in the corner of the library Solona and I were known to haunt. His hand brushed my shoulder, moving the hair away from my neck as he carefully left the room. For half a heartbeat, I regretted the imminent loss of his trust.

What little trust there was.

Maker, we were so young. Had it only been that morning that I had awoken Solona and we had rejoiced at our shared success, our reuniting on the far side of our Harrowing, of the threat of Tranquility removed and the long list of freedoms we could enjoy together? I had actually been day dreaming of another tryst with Cullen, and now…

Now the only breath I wanted on my skin was the one that thundered through the trees of the Brecilian forest, that stirred the smoke of a hundred chimneys in Denerim, that carried the warmth of the sun across the lake and away from the Circle Tower at Kinloch.

“Are you packed?” Anders asked, from where he crouched, invisible, under my study carousel.

It was to my credit that I did not jump.

“There is nothing from here I will want where I go,” I answered, as if grumbling to myself about a passage in the book I pretended to read. “Leave it. They will not immediately believe me gone.”

“I tried that once,” Anders said, with the air of a fond memory. “Maybe it will work better for you.”

“Maybe?”

“Duck on my mark.”  
“What?”

“ _Duck!”_

I dropped out of the seat and crouched on the floor. I still couldn’t see Anders – the invisibility trick was hard to maintain while moving and didn’t fool a Templar with a phylactery, but it was unbeatable for stealth when you were frozen in place.

There was the vague sound of armored feet in the library, a whispered admonishment from Cullen, and then silence once more.

“Can you cast an illusion to-“

“Yes,” I grunted, already working the minimal amount of mana it took to perfectly replicate the library. I held the illusion in place while Anders and I quickly exited – anyone who looked in would see the room empty, rather than the room with two fleeing mages occupying it.

We carefully slipped into the stacks and I let the illusion go slowly, so as not to alert Cullen or the rest of the templars of my actions. There was enough magic usage in Kinloch at any given time to cover us, if we were slow and careful.

Anders led me unfailingly back to the window we’d looked out before.

“You can’t be serious,” I hissed as he laced his fingers together again. “It’s a straight drop to the lake from here. We’d die.”

“I’ve done it three times and not died yet,” he countered. “How did you think I was getting out?”

“The service entrance by the dock,” I replied.

Anders cocked his head as I stepped into his hands. “Never thought of that. Is it being watched?”

“You ass,” I muttered as he breathed a laugh and I gripped the edge of the window. He propelled me upwards and my feet found a lip in the stone my eyes could not. An instant later Anders had clambered up beside me and was carefully lifting the degraded shutter off its hinges. He slipped out the window and disappeared into the darkness beyond. I swallowed, glancing over my shoulder at the candlelit library, and then followed him out into the sweet night air.

There was another ledge on the stone work, a necessary feature for ongoing maintenance to a massive tower in the middle of a lake. There was no room to assemble scaffolding, after all, and Anders silently pointed out the dozens of places designed for tie-downs and safety mechanisms for workers. From under his robe he uncoiled dozens of feet of robe while holding onto the still-open window with one crooked arm. He threaded the rope through one of the safety eyelets, firmly placed my hands around the rope, and then turned his back to me to close the broken window shutters behind us.

I was glad it was pitch dark outside, an overcast moonless night. There was no way I could look down.

“Slide down the rope,” he breathed into my ear. “It ends two feet above a landing, you’ll only have a short way to fall.”

“You first,” I countered.

He shook his head with a whisper of a laugh. “Don’t trust me?”

“Show me how it’s done, oh wise one.”

With a flourish, Anders let go of the wall, leapt off the ledge, grabbed the rope, and plummeted out of sight.

There was a muffled sort of grunt a few seconds later, and then I heard a voice call out a challenge on the other side of the window. I wrapped myself around the rope and slid down behind Anders.

“More like six feet,” he said when my feet reached the end of the line and I was yet swinging in the open air. His voice sounded like it was straight below me. “I’ll catch you.”

“Surana?” I heard, distantly, in the library.

I let go of the rope.

I ended up in Anders’ arms in a heap on a cold stretch of flat stone.

“Now what?” I asked after we laid in silence in the darkness for a moment, caught our breath, and prayed our graceless landing hadn’t given us up.

“Now we swim.”

“Fuck you.”

Anders snorted and whispered something I didn’t quite make out. I felt the barest surge of his magic and the rope came tumbling out of the darkness to pin me on my back on the landing.

“My goodness, such language,” Anders laughed easily, although his voice was still the barest whisper, lost in the sound of the water that was suddenly so much more noticeable than it ever was inside the Tower. “I’ve done this before, Opie, do you trust me or not?”

I sighed and shrugged the rope off of me. It slithered away in the darkness, and I could only assume Anders had coiled it back around his waist. My eyes were adjusting slowly to the darkness; I had been too many years in the candlelit interior to fully embrace the night.

Anders’ hand was in mine, then, and we were padding silently down whatever stretch of stone he had put us upon. Somewhere between ten and ten thousand steps – I was too dazzled by the sound of waves against the stone below us, the growing glow of the Tower behind us, and the endless whispered promises of the wind to really pay attention to things like time and distance – Anders suddenly stopped tugging me forward and instead pulled me _down_.

There was a roughly cut path down the damaged bridge to the water, and enough debris in the water beneath the bridge to pick our way across. We had to swim at one point; or, rather, Anders swam it, secured a line, and I pulled myself across the rope hand-over-hand as he promised to heal my already blistering rope burns once we were safely ashore.

We climbed back onto the bridge in the darkness and made our way to the eastern shore of Lake Calenhad before the low tones of bells announced mid-of-night in the Tower behind us. My bare toes sunk into damp soil for the first time in ten years as I turned to look at the dull glow of shuttered windows and torchlit docks marking Kinloch at night. With his hand around my wrist to avoid pressure on sensitive palms and blistered fingers, Anders led me briskly north.

“Duncan was taking Loner to Ostagar,” he told me as we walked the narrow line between noisy underbrush and revealing shore. “I will get you on their trail, help you find them if I can, heal up your hands, and then we must split up. They should have sent your phylactery to the White Spire, but I suspect Irving kept it around, with the intention of shipping it with Loner’s at a later date.  You haven’t been Harrowed for long; it’s possible that he hid them or moved them when he decided to send Solona into the vault with Jowan. Pity you couldn’t have checked his office for it while you were in there tonight.”

“They might still have my phylactery?” I tried to keep my voice down but panic was rapidly creeping in. “Why didn’t you tell me? I shouldn’t have-“

“Irving will be desperate to recapture you before you can reach Duncan,” Anders continued calmly as if I hadn’t spoken. He turned suddenly onto a narrow path that must have been a game trail; I had only ever read about them before. “He can’t risk you being conscripted. That’s why he won’t chase me.”

“You son of a-“

“But we’re going to get you to Solona before he can send out the Templars, because there are currently no boats on the island. With the Senior Enchanters going to Ostagar and the Warden Commander leaving with Solona, there weren’t any boats for us to steal to make our escape and they will assume we’re still somewhere in the Tower, biding our time. They’ll either send the boats back to the shore or lock them down on the island, but either way we’ll have a several day head start. And all we have to do is catch up to Solona-“

“Who was waiting for you just this side of freedom,” my best friend said as Anders and I suddenly stepped into a clearing. “How did you talk her into it, Anders?” she asked, gleefully, as I was swept into her arms and spun around.

“This is why you bid us wait?” Duncan asked coolly from somewhere behind her. I couldn’t see him. I didn’t care. It was Solona. I had Solona back.

“Anders and I talked about this once,” Solona confessed to her Commander as she set me down. “If one of us was allowed to leave for some reason, the other could escape on her heels. We have a plan, Duncan. No one will suspect the Wardens of any wrongdoing in this.”

There was no fire – they sat and waited for me in the darkness. I suddenly felt like a child amongst adults. It had never occurred to me to leave the Tower. It had never crossed my mind to make a contingency plan for ways Solona and I could someday be free. I had been Harrowed nearly a month before her and yet I was suddenly in her shadow.

It lasted all of thirty seconds. “Opie, you shithead, you didn’t bring _anything?_ You’re going to freeze out here. There’s _weather_.”

I started to laugh, helplessly. “Isn’t it summer?” I asked as I swung a half-hearted punch in her direction. She let it land, too happy in our reuniting to bother to dodge.

“It is the end of summer, yes,” Duncan agreed. “You should be well enough in your robes for now. Leaving her things behind,” he said to Solona, “and I assume the extra bag you decided to abandon, will make it seem less likely your friend has left the Circle, and more likely she is hiding somewhere out of grief. It was a wise move.”

Solona grunted. “This is why ser Cullen always beats me in chess.”

“He beats you?” Anders chided as he channeled mana into my hands and my rope burns disappeared in a surge of cold. “Opie always kicks his ass.”

“Oh?” Duncan asked. There was a smile in his voice, palpable even in the darkness. I was being pushed into blankets, then, and a few short seconds later, Loner was crawling in beside me like we were scared apprentices on the night of a failed Harrowing. “A mind for tactics is not always found in a Circle.”

“Opie, come be a Warden,” Solona breathed into my ear.

“I want… I need to see my family first,” I said slowly. “It’s been… Kyler has written me every Satinalia for ten years. I would like to spend one with her. And then… _then_ , I would repay the Wardens for my freedom, if they want.”

“That is a fair request,” Duncan asserted.

He might have said more, but Solona’s arms snaked around my waist, her face burrowed into my hair, and her steady breathing whisked me off to sleep.

 

*

 

I awoke to sunlight and birdsong and bugs and dirt and a taste in my mouth akin to unwashed armpits.

It was undiluted perfection.

“Get up, we need to get some more distance between us and Kinloch,” Solona’s voice said, far too near to my ear. I blinked up at her.

“Good morning,” she added a moment later.

“Good morning,” I replied with a grin.

“Scoot, Opie. Duncan’s waiting.”

I dragged myself out of the bedding, helped Solona pack it up, and then worked for a moment to straighten my clothes and hair.

And then… what? I didn’t have to take my turn with any of the chores in the Circle. I didn’t have to attend morning devotions or meet with the First Enchanter or report my plan for the day or… anything. There was no structure, I was adrift in a world with endless possibilities. I could do anything in the next ten minutes.

“This is your breakfast,” Duncan said gently, handing me a paper packet of rations. “We will walk until midday. If we see a source of clean water we will stop and drink and fill our water skins. And aside from that you are free to let your mind wander. There are many new things you will see today; you should devote your attention to those experiences. Trust in me to mind the road.”

“Th-thank you, Warden Commander.”

“My name is Duncan, if you would.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Duncan. Thank you. I’m…” Something Anders had told me, after his second failed attempt, ground my words to a halt. “Where’s Anders?”

“He left in the night,” Duncan answered, shouldering a pack before handing me a smaller one. “He would not say where he was going, and I would not ask. It is likely better that way.”

“Asshole didn’t say goodbye,” Solona chirped from where she was settling her own pack into place.

“Anders… that isn’t his name.” I said as we started walking. “Just like I call Solona, Loner, and she calls me, Opie. He said when you leave the Circle you pick another name, and you never answer to your old one again. It reduces the Templar’s ability to find you. In the Circle, you’re just another face, another mage who might become maleficar, someone they cannot become attached to. They get handed your phylactery and told your name and they track you down. It never made sense to me, how someone could pick you out of a crowd without ever having seen your face. Is magic a stamp across our features?”

“No,” Duncan said, soft and reassuring. “It defines you no more and no less than the color of your eyes, your hair, your height, your voice. You may cover it up or expose it however you choose.” He chuckled, then, and I saw him glance over his shoulder to smile at me. “Choose to wear robes and a staff slung across your back, and you are easy to pick out indeed.”

“Why couldn’t I just… stop using a staff?”

“You’d be crippled,” Solona immediately offered. “Especially out here. A staff makes it infinitely easier to cast offensive magic without draining your mana.”

“But why does it have to be a _staff_ ,” I countered. “Why can’t I have a focus that’s six inches long and strapped to my wrist like a bracer?”

Solona actually paused mid-step and stumbled as she started moving again. “You… you could, I guess. A staff is the size it is for defense, to be used as a quarterstaff or to be disguised as one.”  
“You could put a blade on the end and disguise it as a glaive, as well,” Duncan offered.

Solona fell back a step to walk beside me.  “If you’re set to travel to Denerim, there are Tranquil in the city, and dwarves. You could have them work on building you a different sort of staff if you think they’re sympathetic.”

“And you?”

Solona scowled. “I never have to hide magic again, Opie. And I won’t. I will not. I will not change my name. I will not duck my head. I will not camouflage my staff. I am Solona Amell. I am a mage. And the world can just _deal with it_.”

“Your Warden brothers and sisters will support that statement,” Duncan said from the front, a laugh heavy in his voice. “Mages who hesitate to cast spells in the name of not wishing to be exposed are more likely to see their allies killed. We pay a heavy price to be what we are, but that is a tie that binds.”

Solona nodded her head, sharply. “See? You should join us, too, Kaiopi.”

“It’s Opie, now,” I softly insisted, and she dropped her chin as she frowned. “I need to go home, first. I need to see my sister, her husband, our cousins. Even if for only a day. She never gave up on me, and I will regret it for life if I don’t do this.”

“You must put your affairs in order before considering to Join,” Duncan agreed. “We will be in Denerim soon, I am sure. There is a Grey Warden cache we will need to access before many more Wardens can be recruited.”

“So should I turn that way?” I asked, glancing around. Everything in the world was fresh and new; each shrub could have been a landmark for how inexperienced my eye was.

“You should stay with us until the Templars catch up,” Solona asserted. “I’ve got a plan.”

“You should share this plan with the rest of us so that we don’t interfere,” Duncan chided. There was a hard edge in his tone that clearly reminded Solona that he _was_ the Warden Commander, regardless of how he wished be addressed.

“Right,” Solona quickly agreed, and then swallowed. “So. The plan.”

 


	21. Escape: Ophelia Tabris (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Contains minor spoilers for Will to Live)  
> The second-part of Opie's origin story.  
> This also encompasses Senna Tabris' escape, so it's like a two-fer.

It took the Templars less time to catch up than Anders had anticipated. I hoped it was the only thing he’d been wrong about. Duncan heard them coming from literally a mile away, and Solona had plenty of time to get everything in place.

We found a small depression in the ground, just big enough for me to lay on my side in. Solona threw a blanket over me and I focused on the minor illusion. The blanket became part of the ground around me, indistinguishable from the grasses and patches of bare earth that marked the side of the road. Solona stood practically on top of me and summoned a ball of energy around her clenched fist.

Unless they brought someone with them who knew Solona and I well enough to pick apart our auras, or could feel the difference between her spell and mine – which was a ridiculously short list – they would not be able to sense my tiny spell in the whirling vortex of Solona’s anger.

All I had to do was stay silent and keep the illusion in place.

“Halt!” A familiar voice commanded. “In the Maker’s name, I name you-“

“Solona?” Cullen’s voice interrupted. “Ser Simon, we’ve tracked Solona Amell.”

It was everything I could do not to flinch. Of course they would send Cullen to bring me in. Irving would have personally assigned him the duty. Cullen would make sure nothing horrible happened to me on the road back, would shield me and deflect the rage onto Anders.

And he would be able to pick me out of a crowd in his _sleep_.

“You have _no right_ ,” Solona thundered. “First Enchanter Irving and _your Knight-Commander_ both allowed me leave to join the Wardens.”

“She is correct,” Duncan said, in that mild tone laced with Command. “I have conscripted this mage. To attempt to remove her from my care would violate a treaty the Templar order signed with Weisshaupt several hundred years ago.”

“I know how to track a runaway,” Ser Simon spat. “Irving himself handed me this phylactery. Surana is here. Stand aside, or I’ll-”

“The only mage standing before you, _Simon_ , is named _Solona Amell_ ,” Loner spat back in a fair mimic of his tone. “As a Grey Warden I have the right to defend myself. Cullen will not raise a hand against me unfairly, so look for no aid from him. I swear to the Maker I’ve looked for the opportunity to practice my counter to Silence against you for five damn years, you twisted piece of shit. You will get taken back to Gregoire in a _bucket_.”

“We can’t violate a Warden treaty, Simon,” Cullen urged gently. “And there’s only two of us, besides. This is not what we were sent to do.”

“You bow down before these mages too easily, Cullen,” Simon remonstrated him. “She is hiding an apostate, which makes her _maleficar_.”

“I’m hiding an apostate _where_?” Solona laughed. “In my knickers? Kaiopi was small, but she wasn’t _that_ small. And if she were here we’d conscript her into the Wardens and you’d be shit out of luck, idiot.”

Silence met that announcement. No one moved. The seconds stretched on and I felt a bead of sweat form on my brow and run across my face to balance precariously on the tip of my nose.

“Why do you have my phylactery?” Solona said. Breaking the silence.

“This is-“

“I think I know my own blood when it’s dangled in front of my face,” she nearly shouted. “Why do you have my phylactery? Why isn’t it in the White Spire with the rest of the Harrowed Mages?”

“This is not-“

“You son of a bitch.” Solona’s hand was practically buzzing with energy, with the sheer quantity of lightning in her fist. It was nearly impossible to Silence a mage pulling so much power across the Veil; Solona’s threat of having a counter to Silence was harder to disregard in the face of her strength unleashed.

There wasn’t a Templar in the Ferelden Circle who didn’t know the relative strengths of every one of their apprentices. They only sent two Templar to bring me in because everybody knew Cullen was soft on me. They might not have known about the dalliances, but they all knew about the friendship that led to them. I would not fight Cullen, nor would I be able to hide from him.

But if they had planned for a fight with either myself or Solona? They would have brought six. Apiece.

It was possible there were four more Templar somewhere behind Simon and Cullen. It was possible they had backup nearby.

But there was no way they had enough to take on Solona _and_ Duncan _and_ me.

I could almost hear Simon doing the math.

“Here, then,” he grumbled, and I felt Solona shift just before I heard a light _thump_ , presumably of her catching a thrown object.

Solona had my phylactery. Just as she’d said to Simon – a mage knows when a drop of her blood is being dangled in front of her face. I could _feel_ it, in the air some four feet above where I groveled beneath a blanket in the dirt.

There was a sharp crack, and muffled _pop_ , and then the sensation was gone.

It was all I could do not to sigh in relief. Solona, however, let loose the sound for me. There was a shaky sort of release in her breath and she shifted a bit above me. “Maker, that’s an odd feeling.”

“Give the shards to me,” Duncan said. “You will feel better if they are not in your hands.”

Another shift, another silence.

“I think we’re done here,” Solona said coolly. “I am a Warden – or I will be soon enough. I am not for you to stalk anymore, Simon. And if I encounter you again, I will kill you.”

The cold in her voice drove the small hairs on my neck up. I stopped listening to their exchange and focused on the illusion, keeping it in place with the least amount of magic possible.

“Come, Ser Cullen, we must report to First Enchanter Irving that he confused the phylacteries of his two students. Perhaps he is addled in his age.”

There was a shifting above us as the Templars wheeled their mounts. “Give my regards to Kaiopi, Solona,” Cullen’s voice said, with the tones of farewell. “Warden Commander.”

“Cullen,” Solona replied, with only slightly less chill in her voice.

I felt the rumble of their departure as much as I heard it. The minutes stretched on, and then the blanket was drawn away and I was on my feet and then I was in the air, spun around, hair flying, temporarily blinded by the sun.

“You’re free, Opie!” Solona crowed. “Free!”

“He knew I was here,” I told her, dazed. “He had to have. He knew I was here and he didn’t tell Simon.”

“It would have provoked Ser Simon into a fight that would have gotten them both killed _and_ violated a Warden treaty,” Duncan replied. “But your presence would have been quite damning for us as well. So it is best for everyone that he acted as he did.”

“Maybe some little part of him loved you, Opie,” Solona offered gently.

“No,” I sighed, shaking my head. “No, whatever he felt for me was not love. You do not love the bird in the cage, you possess it. And I will _never_ be possessed.”

“We should put some distance between us and those Templars if you wish to stay free,” Duncan asserted. “You should stay with us until we reach Lothering, where we will reprovision. Solona and I will follow the road south to Ostagar from there, while you can take the West Road to Denerim. It should be easy enough to follow, and perhaps we will find a trade caravan to protect you on the way.”

“I don’t have any way to thank you, Duncan,” I confessed.

“Perhaps we will revisit the idea of you Joining when we are next in Denerim,” Duncan replied easily. “As it stands, I do not wish to offer the Joining to someone who has reservations about becoming a Warden or unfinished business to attend to. And the securing of your freedom was weighing heavily on Solona’s mind. I am glad to have it finished.”

“I would have come back to the Circle and conscripted you and Anders the first chance I got,” Solona laughed. “Irving be damned.”

“Which would not have been beneficial to our relationship with the Circle,” Duncan disagreed gently. “The Grey Wardens have a precarious position in Ferelden, Enchanter Amell. We must do nothing to damage our reputation with a Blight at hand.”

“Blight?” I repeated, aghast. “There’s a Blight coming?”

“Yes,” Duncan softly confirmed. “So tie up your business in Denerim quickly, Enchanter Surana. It may be that many more Wardens must be recruited before any of us are safe.”

 

*

 

Lothering was pretty, in the sense that it was the first village I had seen in a decade, the first settlement I had seen beyond Denerim and Kinloch, and it was abuzz with people and life.  
Aside from that, it was a shithole three paces deep in filth and hatred.

The Chantry was working hard at killing rosebushes and pressing down on the populace with their Templars. The elves we met were all holding on to life with their fingernails, the dual weights of prejudice and poverty clamped to their ankles. There was a qunari in a cage and the beginnings of brigands on the road.

But it was _life_ and it was _people_ and it was _new_ and I could explore and investigate and speak as I chose. Duncan bought us both cloaks from a pair of Dwarven merchants just outside town, a father and son, and we used them to cover our mage robes.

“Just for today, Loner,” I begged when she balked at hiding her identity. “Let us run around town together for _one day_ before you leave for Ostagar and I for Denerim. Can we be just two women, two friends, for one short day?”

Solona sighed and then flashed me a grin, her protectiveness on the road subsiding into her usual flashfire emotions. “I don’t think I remember how to run, now that you mention it.”

I pulled up the hem of my cloak-and-skirts and awkwardly took a few paces. Solona’s legs were longer and she darted past me. After a moment the memory came back – the alienage with Kyler, the marketplace with Senna and Soris and Silar – and I was chasing after her, laughing at the wind in my face, the sun on my shoulders, the air rasping through lungs unaccustomed to the effort of running.

For his part, Duncan sat on a curbstone and laughed at us.

We ate that night at the inn – a real inn! – and the poorly milled grain in the bread and more gristle than meat in the stew did little to dull the experience. I walked through the Chantry the next morning with my head high, and took devotions with the rest of the travelers before the locals had their turn. Duncan bartered with the dwarven merchants again, and tried to get them to take me on the Denerim. They refused, but another group – a mixed group of humans and elves – quickly agreed to see me to my family in the alienage. Duncan flashed the Warden crest on his armor and told them he would personally be coming to the alienage to check on me – he had a long history with Elder Valendrian, and would know if anything happened to me on the road. There were eager nods, but the gold sovereign pressed into the leader’s hands – and the promise of future Warden custom if they proved reliable – was worth more than the threat.

And, suddenly, we were parting ways again. This time, though, I hugged Solona freely. She pulled me into her arms and squeezed until I could scarcely breath, but I wanted her to never stop. It had been her and I against everyone – every _thing_ – for years, and now…

“Write to me, and tell me of your travels,” I whispered to her. “If you settle in one place for a time, tell me so I may write you as well.”

“We should be some time in Ostagar, with the army,” Solona whispered back. “When you get to Denerim, please write and let me know. I’ll send you what money I can find, so you can get your family set up. I will come for you when we get to Denerim. We should be together, Opie.”

“Be well, Loner,” I breathed and then stepped back. “Be well, be safe. What is your new pledge?”

“In war, victory,” she answered immediately, with a smile. “In peace, vigilance. In death, sacrifice.”

I clasped her hands one last time and then began to slowly pace backwards towards the caravan that would bear me away. “Then I bid you a quick victory, and many long years of vigilance.”

“Thank you, Opie,” Duncan said softly. “It was an honor to have met you.”

“The honor was mine, Warden Commander,” I replied. “I look forward to a repeat.”

We both walked backwards for as long as we could, waving and making faces and blowing kisses until the road curved and bore her out of sight.

I should have worked to meet the people in the caravan. I should have learned their names, memorized their faces, interacted with them and brought myself into their world.

I was so caught up in the world around me, though, I had no attention span. The weather was shifting as the year aged, and the southern edges of the Brecilian forest were already begin to turn the fiery hues of autumn. The animals were on the move: bears settling in for the winter, wolves setting territory for the cold months to come, birds of more shapes and sizes than I could name winging away north for warmer climes.

There were fields and farms and forests, little villages and sprawling towns and lonely castles perched atop far-flung hills.

I had travelled across Ferelden before, as a child. But I had been so terrified in the templar’s grasp, so cowed and anxious of my future, that I had paid little mind to the road we followed or the world around us. Now, with nothing before me but years of sweet freedom, every tree was worth examining. Each blade of grass had worth. The wind had a different taste every time it graced my face, and I was determined to become familiar with its every variant.

I could not tell you how many days it took us to make the long walk to Denerim – over a week, but likely less than two – but my joy at seeing the broad city gates – the first thing we came across that I _remembered_ – was cut short by the news that had winged in ahead of us from Ostagar.

“Ostagar is lost! King Cailan betrayed by Wardens! Teryn Logain to bring the army home to Denerim!”

I wanted to strike the crier. I wanted to immolate him where he stood. I wanted to melt his insolence to the pavement, burn his lies out of existence.

I _knew_ Duncan. I _knew_ Solona. Duncan would not get the Wardens thrown out of Ferelden, not when-

“False Blight is Warden’s political maneuvering!” the crier said, as if he could hear my thoughts. “Wardens banned from Ferelden! Price put on any surviving Grey Wardens found inside the borders! Wardens have killed the King!”

“Wardens have killed the King!”

“Wardens have killed the King!”

I fled, letting decade-old muscle memory propel me out of the marketplace and into the winding roads that would lead to the alienage. The words were everywhere, echoing off the walls, dogging my steps.

I should have been with her.

Maker, what if she was dead?

I stumbled through the gates into the alienage, staggering to Vhenadahl and wrapping my arms around the great tree that was simultaneously much too large and much too small for my memories of it.

“Are you unwell, child?” a voice asked, and I snapped my head up to meet the eyes of Elder Valendrian.

“Duncan,” I gasped, as the recognition blossomed in his face. “I just left him, in Lothering, and to hear… to hear… Elder, please, do you know if he is well? Have you any news of the Wardens?”

“The Wardens are slain, Kaiopi,” he intoned carefully. “There are rumors of one or two who were not in the battle having fled the carnage, but the others… Warden Commander Duncan is known to be dead, with King Cailan. They were seen to be fighting beside each other in the retreat.”

“How do you-“

“Natalia’s grandsons were there,” he answered. “One survived. He knew to give every bit of knowledge to her, regardless of how much importance he might put upon it. Now, child, tell me… How did you come to return here? Do you bring the doom of the Templar upon us?”

I shook my head. “No. No, Elder. My… my friend… was conscripted into the Wardens. She destroyed my phylactery, and they… she and Duncan were going… they were going to… and I was…” It wasn’t until my words failed that I realized I was sobbing, clinging to the tree as if it was all I had left to pin me to the world.

If I had not followed, if I had not escaped with Anders, my last view of Solona would have been the dark spot in a boat on the far side of the lake.

Valendrian lifted me free of the tree and cradled me in his arms. “You will not be Joining the Wardens now, child. And your friend… the odds are not good for your friend.”

I nodded, brokenly. “I wanted… Kyler has been writing to me, and I wanted…”

“Ah, yes,” Valendrian sighed, and somehow the sadness in his face deepened. “It is best if that news comes from your family. Come, let me show you to your sister.”

An uncertain sort of fear blossomed in the pit of my stomach, and I followed him to the little house beside uncle Cyrion’s home, which was the big one that leaned haphazardly towards Vhenadahl. On the walk I realized the alienage was nearly silent; no one was out but Elder Valendrian, and him likely only because of the stranger clutching his tree. There were no children playing, no women at work.

The fear grew, and my hands began to tremble.

The door to the house I grew up in swung open, and there before me was my sister, my beloved sister, sitting beside the neighborhood brat I had been so surprised to read had grown up to be the man of her dreams. Gil was holding my nephew – little Felix – in his arms, and Kyler’s eyes, so like mine, spoke of days of crying.

“Kaiopi,” she gasped, shooting to her feet. Elder Valendrian let himself out as she shot across the room, throwing herself into my arms.

I had imagined this moment a dozen times during the long walk to Denerim, and this was a horrible bastardization of the best case scenario. I had hoped she would embrace me. I had hoped she would accept me. I had even dared to hope, once, that she would be glad to see me.

But this _desperation;_ it was not what I wanted.

“Kyler, Kyler, love, what has happened?”

“Kaiopi,” she sobbed. “Oh, Kaiopi, the Maker heard my prayer. Kaiopi, it was the Arl’s son, Vaughan. He interrupted Senna and Silar’s weddings and he… and he… he called it _first night_...”

The fear twisted in my gut, hardening. It formed a point of white heat, and for the first time in my life I knew rage.

“Where are they?” I demanded.

“Urien’s basement,” she panted. “Silar and Soris and Uncle Cyrion and Gil and Nelaros – that’s Senna’s husband – they’re all leaving to go break them out. I heard… I heard he wants to sell them to _slavers_.”

My hand clenched in a fist and I felt my palm fill with fire.

“No,” I hissed. “No, he will _not_.”

 

*

 

Nelaros, at least, had no idea who I was. Kyler’s sister was someone he had not been around the family long enough to have heard mention of. Had I still worried about anyone’s opinions of me – and I did not, not with Kyler’s sobbing embrace and entreaties to the Maker – I would have been relieved by the exultant welcome I got from the men of my family.

“How?” Silar asked, simply.

“I was travelling with Warden Commander Duncan,” I replied, and it was technically true. “I asked to travel back to Denerim and see my family before Joining the Wardens.”

“That’s some timing,” Uncle Cyrion said, whistling thinly through his teeth. “Can you… Will you…”

“I’m coming with you,” I said, carefully pinning my hood in place so that it wouldn't tip back and render me identifiable. “I don’t have a staff, so I can’t provide a lot of damage in that sense, but there a lot of other things I can do. Just… don’t ask me any questions once we get there, and stay out of my way.”

“I am… I am _so glad to see you_ ,” Silar breathed, and I stepped willingly into his proffered embrace. “I know… I barely know Nesiara. But they took her, and they… Senna was bleeding pretty heavily when they carted her off, Opie.”

“I can’t arm you,” I gritted between clenched teeth. “You’ll have to make due with clubs and belt knives. But I swear to you all… we get through this, and our family will never be helpless again.”

“Kaiopi-“

“I left Kaiopi in the Circle,” I said, cutting Soris off. “Today, I’m a Tabris.”

Gil nodded, and then led the way out of the house I’d grown up in, next door to Cyrion’s home. My parents had both died to a fever a few years after the Templars came for me, but Kyler had written immediately and the loss was not as sharp as it might have been.  Cyrion had a sword – his wife’s, my aunt Adaia’s – but he did not hold it like he knew what to do with it. “If we can get it to Senna,” he said, half under his breath and half to me once he’d caught my eye on it, “we’ll have more than a fighting chance. Adaia taught her everything she knew. Your little cousin has grown into a hell of a fighter, Opie.”

“Then that has to be our goal,” I answered, thinking fast. This was far more important than beating Cullen in chess. “We rush to Senna and the others, and fight _out_ rather than fight _in_.”

“We’ll have an easier time with stealth than force,” Cyrion quickly agreed.

With that, Cyrion took the lead. He had a familiarity with the portion of town housing the estates of the various Arls and Banns because he’d worked for years for Bann Rodolf. He led us unerringly to the basement of the Arl of Denerim’s estate.

We didn’t expect it to be guarded.

“Who the Void did they think was going to come here?” Gil complained as we peered around a corner at the three mercenaries standing around the bolted-closed bulkhead doors leading beneath the estate.

“Slavers,” I answered immediately. “They don’t want the slavers causing any trouble.”

“Fuck,” Silar sighed. “Alright. Here’s the way this goes.” He turned to face the rest of us. “Father, give me mother’s sword. Nelaros, Soris and I will lead them away. They’ll think us foolhardy, reckless youth, but if I’m armed they will _have_ to give chase. They won’t expect you two to be around, and they _sure_ won’t expect Opie. We’ll buy you as much time as we can, and then circle back and help you escape.”

He shot me a wry look. “If Opie got out of the Circle, she can take on _Templars_ , not just these asshole guards.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to insist _I’m not that kind of mage_. I wanted to rebuke him, wanted to say I didn’t know that sort of thing, wanted to tell him that magic should not ever be used to harm, to _kill_ …

But I did know. I’d spent hours with Irving, learning how to lure and fight demons, how to set up a perfect trap in Harrowings, how to explain to the spirits what it was we were doing and how to guarantee the mages would survive to the point they would make the Choice, the decision that either sent them home a success or saw them killed in the space between two breaths by the Templars standing by.

I’d spent _years_ with Anders, after little Emmalia was found bleeding and crying in a store room and had to be made Tranquil. She was only a year younger than I, and it had shaken Solona and I badly. Anders had taken to teaching us how to protect ourselves, both through stealth and illusion and through pure, unexpected brute force.

Looking at those guards, now, I knew I could kill all three of them within seconds.

Duncan’s voice swirled to life in my memory. “Mages who hesitate to cast spells in the name of not wishing to be exposed are more likely to see their allies killed,” he’d told Solona. At that moment, I knew the words were meant for me.

But I had hesitated, and Silar was leading Soris and Nelaros in a mad charge towards the guards. Silar got his sword in front of him in time to slash a harmless sort of rent in one guard’s arm, and then the three of them were off like an arrow down the far alleyway. The guard Silar had struck followed, close on their heels and gaining. A second took off a moment later. The third stayed in place.

I would not hesitate again.

I strode directly up to him, ignoring his hand flying to his sword.

“You will let me in to see my kin,” I told him, in my best imitation of Duncan’s soft voice of Command.

“I’ll let you suck my cock,” the guard replied evenly.

I nodded. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

He opened his mouth – likely to make a similar demand – and I flicked my wrist, propelling the handful of molten fire I had conjured in my palm directly into his throat.

His tongue was instantly charred beyond recognition, with his throat following a second later. He collapsed to his knees and then fell forward, clutching his neck and twitching violently as he suffocated, his last breath the fumes of his own cooked flesh.

I opened my hand above his still-twitching back, and I summoned a spirit from the Fade into his body.

The guard, sheet-white and moving in jerks and flails, rose to his feet. I reached down, stripped the keys from his belt, and opened the bulkhead door.

“Kill your fellows when they return,” I instructed him.

The possessed corpse nodded, and I turned and gestured for Cyrion and Gil.

Gil darted to my side. Cyrion was staring at me in horror, but he followed Gil and I into the basement.

We encountered no one inside the basement until we reached the locked doors of the dungeon Vaughan had lovingly installed. The key from the guard opened this door, too, and I swung it open on silent hinges to reveal four slavers haggling with one of Vaughan’s cronies about the going rate of “used elf bitches.”

I focused on the man closest to the middle of the group and turned his heart into a furnace, pulling all his blood in and not letting it leave, the pressure superheating his core in a matter of seconds. The others had time only to realize something was going horribly wrong before the pressure burst and the slaver exploded, his bones becoming shrapnel that pierced and slew his fellows.

I walked calmly into the room, stripped the keys from Vaughan’s servant, and methodically opened the doors behind which my relatives cowered,

“What the bloody fuck happened out here?” Senna breathed as she staggered out of captivity. While we hadn't been close as children, she was easy to recognize, even after ten years; her eyes were amber to the point of almost orange, giving her a feral look beneath short-cropped flaming hair. “Father? Gil? How did you-“

“Kaiopi,” Shianna breathed, my name a prayer. “Kaiopi, how did you know?”

“I didn’t,” I answered, letting my cousin’s cousin step into the circle of my arms. “It was merely miraculous timing. We have to get out of here. Silar is in trouble.”

“Mom’s sword?” Senna demanded, breaking out of her father’s embrace.

“Silar took it,” Cyrion admitted.

“Damn fool was worthless with a sword. It was daggers or nothing with him.” She dug through the remnants of the slavers and came up with three belt knives and a shoddy sort of sword. She kept the longer blade and handed the knives to myself and the men. “Let’s go get him.”

We walked out the way we had come, although now supporting Nesiara and Valora, the wives of Silar and Soris, respectively. Shianni seemed broken, somehow, but was held upright by her own inner fire. Senna was covered in blood, but oddly, none of it seemed to be hers.

 _Good girl_.

We emerged from the basement in the exact wrong moment.

The guards Silar had led off were coming back to their post, dragging the bodies of our kin.

The guard I had left possessed drew his sword and advanced.

“Silar!” Senna screamed, and launched herself at the guard holding her brother by his ankle.

There was a wide trail of blood in their wake.

“Senna, _wait_ ,” I cried, but she was lost to rage and a grief I could not fathom.

From where I stood, it was clear her twin was dead.

One guard was dead within seconds, cut down by the fellow I’d raised. The other managed to get a single parry off before Senna systematically severed his hamstring, lateralis, and jugular.

I stepped to the possessed corpse and drew my knife across his neck, banishing the spirit as I did so.

Senna dropped to her knees and frantically checked Silar for a pulse. A similar procedure was happening with Soris and Nelaros but I had eyes only for Silar.

Senna’s head drooped and she swallowed a sob, nearly vomiting in the process.

“He’s alive.” I pivoted to see Shianni holding up Soris’ head, Valora hovering nearby. “Opie, he’s alive, can you…?”

I shook my head and dropped to a crouch beside him. “I’m sorry. I was never any good at healing. That was Solona’s strength, and I didn’t study…” I swallowed. “No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Shianni nodded her acceptance. If there was one thing life in the alienage taught you, it was how to accept things you could not bear to hear.

“Went down fighting,” Soris told us as we crowded around, every one of us reaching out to lay a hand to his chest, feeling his pulse going thready and desperate. “Adaia’s sword… barrel… alley…”

“I will find it, Soris,” Senna said gently. “Thank you.”

“Valora…”

“I’m here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know, Soris. I forgive you. All is forgiven.”

“May you find peace at the Maker’s side,” Nesiara whispered, and Soris smiled beautifully at her as his heart beat its last.

“We have to get out of here,” I said, standing.

My kin surprised me again. I expect wails, weeping, keening… Instead, the six of them pushed to their feet. Gil swung Soris over his shoulder, Cyrion lifted Nelaros, and Senna pulled her twin into a lengthwise carry, his feet to one side and his head to the other.

The adrenaline was fading, now that everyone was safe. I would have done horrible things in exchange for a vial of lyrium right then.

But hiding took the least amount of mana of any of my tricks.

“Stay together,” I instructed. “As close as you can. I’ll make sure no one can see us, but we’ll have to be quick and careful.”

I was aided by night falling, and my family knowing the fastest, quietest route back to the alienage. I was able to focus on holding the illusion of empty air around us, and we half-ran home. If anyone noticed the disturbance, they could not have identified the people it hid.

We stumbled into the alienage a few minutes after full dark, and laid our slain out in front of the Vhenadahl, as was our way. Senna turned on her heel and went right back out, returning scarcely an hour later with her mother’s sword strapped beneath her battered and bloody wedding clothes. Cyrion had gone next door with Shianni, as she’d finally broken down into uncontrollable sobs once we’d all stopped moving, and told her uncle how she’d been raped. Valora and Nesiara had retreated to the second floor, where Silar had planned to live with his new bride. There was plenty of room for everyone, now.

“I’m teaching them all to fight,” Senna announced when she kicked open the door to the house I had grown up in. Kyler and Gil were there, with little Felix asleep in the bedroom already. “You won’t have to worry about your family going to hell in your absence ever again, Kaiopi.”

“It’s just Opie, now,” I informed her. “And, no. No I won’t. Because I’m not leaving home again. The Wardens are broken, the Blight is coming, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. I’m home to stay.”

“You can’t be just Opie, nobody’s name is _just Opie_ ,” Kyler sighed with an eyeroll.

“You’re the one who gave her the damn nickname,” Senna countered.

“Ophelia,” Gil offered, the first he’d spoken in hours. “Tell them your name is Ophelia.”

As I nodded, Senna bumped shoulders with me. “Ophelia _Tabris_ , it should be.”

I leaned over to elbow her in return. “Ophelia Tabris it is.”


	22. Escape: Rian Brosca

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you find Leske in Beraht's dungeon in DA:O, he says his friend gave up - just stopped eating one day, "All for a stupid bet."  
> So this was a pretty easy fix. What happened if Brosca just... didn't give up?

“Sod off, I’m getting out of here,” I muttered to Leske, for probably the fifth time in as many hours.

“You’ll rip the prints off your fingers if you keep that up,” he countered. “Be smart about it. If they know you’re trying to pick it bare-knuckled they’ll strengthen the lock.”

“Light blinded nug humper,” I half-grunted through gritted teeth. “Sod off with your logic.”

“Look, just wait for an opportunity, idiot,” he entreated from his cell. Something about his tone gave me pause. It was almost like Leske – Leske! – was pleading with me. “If Beraht thinks you’re resigned to your fate he’ll let his guard down and leave us down here to rot. Then you’ll have as much time to pick the lock as you want.”

I sighed and pushed away from the door. Some of the fight went out of Leske’s shoulders and he slumped to the floor, mindless of the filth strewn across the stone.

“I’m getting out of here,” I told him again.

Leske, for what it was worth, just nodded.

 

*

 

I lost track of the days. Weeks, it would be better to say. Had a year passed? I couldn’t say.

They brought food. I put it in my mouth, at Leske’s urging, although it bore no taste and left no memory. I stopped twice – the second time I managed to miss four or five meals – but Leske reminded me of my original determination. “You’re getting out of here, remember?” he would call through the bars, sometimes for hours before I really heard him. And, somehow, it sunk in.

The relief in his eyes when I lifted spoon to lip was the only thing my mind could recall when I thought back. It was the only thing that mattered when the torchlight entered the cell block at a different angle one fine day.

“Maker’s fuzzy nutsack, how long have you been down here?” a woman’s voice demanded. It punctured my apathy like nothing ever had, and I felt my eyes drawn to her in shock.

_Warden_ , the griffon on her armor told me. It was like nothing I had ever seen, the cut and material seemed wholly inappropriate to a fighter. But then I saw the staff slung across her back and realized this was my very first encounter with a mage.

“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Leske answered, the eagerness at a rescue barely cutting through the exhaustion in his voice.

“Nobody ever came for you?” she asked as a redheaded woman worked a rusted key in the lock on Leske’s door. It swung open on protesting hinges and she turned a critical eye to my cell.

“I do not think I can open this, Solona,” she told the Warden. “The key is weak from rust, and the… the woman trapped within has damaged the lock in her attempts to pick it open. I’m not sure I could have picked it, myself, were I in her position.”

For the first time since my imprisonment, my eyes flooded with tears. To have rescue dangled in front of me and then snatched away…

But the Warden just snorted and waved her companions – there were two more behind her, I noticed – to stand aside. “Do you have a name?” she asked me.

“Rian,” I told her, my voice hoarse from disuse. “Rian Brosca.”

“Get in the far corner, Rian,” she answered, rage and compassion at war behind her words. “Cover your head with your arms and turn your back to the door.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said as I complied with her orders as best I could. My limbs felt leaden and my head swum when I stood. How long had I sat?

When I was crouched as best I was able, a loud buzzing sound erupted behind me, and heat flared against my back. I could see sparks out of the corner of my eye, and I pinched my lids tightly shut against the strange not-fire.

“You’ve fused it shut, Solona,” the redhead chided. “Why would you hit it with lightning?”

“Because it’s rusted metal, Leliana,” the retort immediately fired back. “Maker’s teat, when will you figure out that I know what I’m doing?”

“I-“

“Alistair, will you kindly bash the door open, now that the entire structure is as brittle as Morrigan’s dusty twat?”

There was a snort, and then a shifting of armor; three harsh running footsteps and a colossal _crash_ followed and then there were scraps of rusted, broken bars all around me. A hand on my shoulder made me flinch, but then I leaned into it and turned to meet the eye of my savior.

He was tall – but he was human, so that was to be expected. His blond hair was brushed away from his forehead and bore a few scattered hints of red, echoed by the slight tint to his stubble. He was handsome, though, or as handsome as a human could be. His face was kind, and – blessedly – there was not a hint of pity in his eyes.

“We heard you entered the proving and won?” he asked softly.

I managed to nod.

He clapped me gently on the shoulder. “You deserve better than you got, Rian Brosca.”

“Th-thank you, Warden,” I answered, belatedly noticing the griffon on his armor.

“Maker, but you’d make a hell of a Warden,” the leader – Solona, they’d called her – said from somewhere over his shoulder. “Rockheaded cuntbunnies don’t know a good thing when they see one. If I had the capability to offer you to Join the Wardens, I would.”

“Th-th-th-thank you,” I managed, my rusty voice catching on an unexpected lump. “Are a-a-all surfacers like you?”

The redhead snorted, while the male Warden  - Alistair - shook his head sadly. “Not hardly,” Solona answered confidently. “But the casteless brand means a fuckton less up there. We can take you, if you want to go.”

“Solona, we promised Bhelen-“

“Shit for brains waited this long, he can wait a bit longer. We’re just going to walk these two to the doors and get them set up with some supplies. She can wait outside and get her bearings, and come with us when we leave.”

“L-l-l-leave?” I managed. I was remembering myself enough to be ashamed of the stutter.

“It’s the best plan we’ve got,” Leske chimed in from somewhere out of sight.

I was in no position to argue. “I’ll follow Leske in this,” I said, standing shakily and trying to put as much assertiveness in my tone as I could dig out of my empty belly.

“Alright,” Solona agreed with a smart sort of snap to her head. “Let’s get the bloody fuck out of this shithole and introduce some dwarves to the sun.”

“You’ve got quite the mouth for a Warden,” Leske managed as we were swept up in the wake of the force of nature that was Warden Amell.

“And here I thought she was being markedly polite,” the other Warden remarked mildly.

The leader laughed and threw a half-hearted sort of backhand in his general direction. He actually stepped into it, as if eager for the contact. “Call me a softy for the plight of the casteless,” she replied, the self-deprecation in her tone at odds with her oozing confidence.

This surfacer made no damn sense.

I kept my eyes to the ground as she led us up, up, up out of Beraht’s dungeon, into the upper halls of Orzammar where casteless were banned, right through the main doors to the exit I had never dreamed of gazing upon.

“Atrast Vala, Warden,” the gate guard intoned. “Who are-“

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” Solona interrupted. “I’m conscripting these two, and taking them outside to get used to the sunshine. I’ll be back in two shakes.”

“Two… shakes…? Of what?”

“What did I say about questions?” she laughed, and then I was around the edge of the door and standing on the surface.

There was a massive white ceiling above me, but the _light_ was unthinkable. It was everywhere and stronger than a thousand torches and it was _palpable_ on my skin, a heat that I was completely unprepared for.

“Oh, thank the Maker it’s cloudy,” Solona said, from somewhere ahead of me in the searing inferno that was sunlight. “You’ve got some time to get used to a muted daylight before stepping straight into sun. A few months from now, it’ll be summer and then we’ll have to teach you about sunburns.”

“You mean it gets _brighter_?” Leske asked in a strangled tone.

“We’ll get you into the shade and get Bodahn to help you get settled,” Solona said in lieu of an answer. “Come on.”

 

*

 

There was so much to learn.

Night and day. Weather. Seasons! Luna and Satina and stars and the sun, birds and bugs and more kinds of living things than my imagination ever could have conjured.

We didn’t wait for Solona to come back from the Deep Roads, taking the supplies Bodahn and Sandal fitted us with and striking out on our own, into the direction Bodahn called “north”. It wasn’t that I wasn’t infinitely grateful… I just had no intention of repaying my savior by joining the Wardens.

Coming to the surface meant I _didn’t_ have to die in the Deep Roads, and there was no way I was going to live my new life with the knowledge that I was going to end up right back where I started. I could do without that particular brand of inevitability, thank you very much.

We’d gotten a book from Bodahn full of pictures of things that were good to eat, and things that were good to avoid as much as possible. It wasn’t that different than living in Dust Town, when you got right down to it… some people would help you out, some people would shank you the second your back was turned. It was a steep learning curve, but we managed to stay ahead of it.

And then we ran square into the Waking Sea.

The stars in the endless sky had taught me how very small and insignificant I ultimately was, but the ocean taught me – in a way no other explanation ever had – exactly why the surfacers believed in the Maker.

The Sea was very much as alive as the Stone, as I was beginning to suspect was the Sky.

I said as much to a fisherman, when we waved him down and subsequently spent five days asking him every question his good natured smile encouraged us to spill like we were children and not Proven fighters. His name was Alaric, and he told me I was as good as an Avvar. It meant nothing to me, but he seemed to find everything about Leske and me amusing, so I assumed Avvar wasn’t an insult and let it be.

Alaric helped us find our way down the coast to West Hill, where we took ship – ship! – across the Waking Sea to Kirkwall.

Leske spent the entire trip vomiting over the side, but I was entranced. The swells, the winds, the spray, the haunting calls of the seabirds hidden in the mist… it was what I imagined dreams must be. It was too short of a trip, as far as I was concerned, and it ended in disappointment when we were denied entry into the City of Chains. Kirkwall was inundated with refugees from the Blight, and its gates were closed. We stood on the deck of the ship and debated our options.

In the end, we decided to stay on with the ship as it moved down the coast to other cities in the Free Marches. Leske eventually got over his sea sickness, and after two weeks began to actually enjoy the trip.

Which was why, when we set foot in Ostwick, we were both all smiles.

I don’t have any idea where we would have ended up otherwise.

“I have never seen two dusters grinning like such idiots before,” a dry voice told us from an alley as we made our way to the merchants’ quarter. “You’ve got me positively brimming with curiosity.”

Leske stepped in front of me, as was long our way, and I was able to just barely glimpse a dwarf leaning against the stones making up the corner of a building. He was dark; dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes, dark expression. He wore his Carta brand like a shout.

“What can I say,” Leske answered, trying to match the stranger’s tone. “We’re happy to be here.”

He was answered with a chuckle, and I decided I needed to come up with a better adjective than _dark_. The man was shadows incarnate.

“You dusters looking for work?”

“First,” I replied, stepping softly around Leske, “what makes you think we’re dusters? And second, since when do Carta recruit unknowns?”

The shadow made a show of looking the both of us up and down. Leske was fairly well put together, in mostly matching Carta mail from Bodahn’s impressive collection, and sword and shield appropriately sized for a dwarf. I could only imagine what he saw in me; I was a mishmash of races and nationalities. I had on gloves and a cowl of Dalish make, and dwarven leather on my body that barely hid the months of near-starvation I had only started to recover from. My hair was chopped off, in a fair imitation of Warden Alistair’s, since it had mostly fallen out in Beraht’s cell. The new growth was all coming in white, making me a cloudhead in truth as well as slur. My daggers were of human make, as were my carefully tooled boots. My eyes were as black as this Carta Shadow’s, though, and they met his stare as an equal.

We were all casteless up here.

“You’ve got the same brand as my granddad,” he answered long minutes later with an almost wistful tone. “Was given it as a child in Orzammar. Maybe it’s dumb, but I feel like I know you.”

I believed him. Years later, I wouldn’t be able to explain why I took his proffered hand, but I did, and I never regretted it.

“Rian Brosca,” I told my new boss.

“Edric Cadash,” he politely returned. “Let me show you around town.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH LOOK ANOTHER NAME THAT MEANS SOMETHING


	23. Escape: Edric Cadash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My Cadash wasn't at the Conclave, and you're going to love the reason why.  
> POV: An Old Friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I must VERY STRONGLY ENCOURAGE all my readers to get acquainted with the work of [Eisen](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3811525/chapters/8494033) and [Coffeeguru.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3774367/chapters/8388889)  
> First, because they're fabulous human beings and the reason I'm motivated to post works for y'all so often and two of my favorite writers.  
> But ALSO because of OTHER THINGS that are RELEVANT TO YOUR INTERESTS.  
> Trust me here.  
> Go! Read!

“Give her to the count of five once she clears the corner, and then we can get onto the ship behind her,” Edric whispered into my ear. I shifted my hands on the vented peak of the roof my belly was pressed onto and shook my head.

“Terrible plan,” I whispered back.

“Great plan,” he countered, a touch of disapproval lacing his voice. He was the boss, after all.

“Absolute shit plan,” I retorted, and tried not to flinch away from his scowl. “This isn’t me being a chickenshit, Edric, this is serious trouble. She’s a Seeker for fuck’s sake. You don’t steal from Seekers.”

“What’s a Seeker?’

“Maker’s teat, Edric, I knew you weren’t a believer but I didn’t know you were _ignorant_. Seekers police the Templars and mages both; the Templar order is led by Lord Seeker Lucius.”

“And you can’t steal from her why?”

“Look, I might try to avoid the obligations of nobility, but I never shirked my lessons on _who’s who_. That’s _Cassandra Pentaghast_. She’s the Right Hand of the bloody Divine. We’re not talking about stealing from some random wahoo. We’ll lose hands for this; if we're not caught by the guard she'll hunt us down and do it herself.”

Edric blew out an annoyed breath and pushed back from the peak of the roof. He spun onto his back and crab-walked down to the gutter and stared at the ground, as I slid down to dangle my feet beside him.

“We didn’t come to Kirkwall for reconnaissance,” he reminded me dully. “We came to get _rich_. If Tethras is really out of the game, there’s an opening here for us to get a piece of the commerce during the rebuild.”

“That is _not_ the ship to start with,” I reiterated, and he waved me off wearily.

“No, you’re right. I hear you. That’s why I brought you along. Your discretion has saved my ass too many times for me to discount it now.”

With a nod, we dropped to the ground, eager to move away from the Chantry ship and find ourselves a better target.

My feet were only halfway to the cobblestones when I realized the alley was no longer empty.

Edric had his shield out and one hand on his sword before I’d rolled onto my feet. I left my daggers sheathed, one over each shoulder, and did my best to vanish in the mid-morning sunlight. It was difficult, but I managed; that was another reason why Edric brought me along.

“I’m not here for you, Cadash,” a woman said, in the lilting accent of Orlais. She was barely visible beneath an overhang; my eyes kept trying to slide past her. Edric seemed to have the same problem, and focused instead on the air directly in front of him. “It is your companion who has piqued my interest.”

“Do I know you?” Edric asked, in the gravelly tone he generally reserved for people cheating him in a business deal.

“No,” the woman granted easily. “But given her easy identification of my travelling companion, Lady Cassandra, I’m quite confident your pet noble knows who I am.”

She’d been listening to our conversation. _How_? Maker, I was so sure our voices couldn’t carry, the way we had our faces angled. My mind raced as I tried to put together the pieces. Rogue. Orlesian. Knows Edric, though he doesn’t know her. Travels with the Right Hand of the Divine. _Able to hear us when I was sure no one could_.

My heart, already beating triple time, sank into my feet.

“Lady Nightingale, I presume?” I managed to force out in a whisper.

“Impressive,” Sister Leliana cooed, taking a half-step out of the shadows so her red hair and strange heraldic tabard could serve as verification. It was the all-seeing eye of the Seekers _and_ the sword of mercy from the Templars. I’d never seen them together before, unless maybe in a history book…

“You’re wearing the symbol of the old Inquisition?” I asked, staying firmly in the darkness. I knew she could see me – she was looking me in the eye – but I would take any possible help I could get in escaping this interview alive.

“ _Most_ impressive,” she replied, and this time she didn’t sound patronizing; she sounded like I’d actually surprised her. “Shall I return the favor, and give your name?”

I sighed, and she must have taken it as confirmation. “Evelyn Eleanora, youngest daughter of Bann Trevelyan of Ostwick, last child of his late wife Madeline, Carta sympathizer and general ne’er-do-well.”

I stepped away from the wall and gave her my most elaborate curtsy. “Guilty as charged.”

“I’m not going to hurt your pet, Cadash, you can stand down,” she dismissed Edric without a second glance. He looked to me and I waved him off. With a shrug, he slung his shield over his shoulder and disappeared into a doorway that I knew led into the undercity. Dark Town, they called it here.

“It is safe to assume you’re looking to expand the range of Cadash Carta into Kirkwall?” Leliana asked, stalking towards me with an artful sway of her hips. She didn’t know enough about me to know if it would be a distraction, but she was using it anyway.

Bitch was _dangerous_.

“If any assumption is _safe_ ,” I countered carefully.

“Oh, wouldn’t _you_ be the catch,” she whispered, reaching out to take my chin and turn my face slightly. The scar down my jaw line caught the light, I’m sure, even though she didn’t react. “You stopped Edric from stealing from the Chantry, recognized both Hands of the Divine – though I am quite positive you’ve never been this far from Ostwick, and I have _never_ been officially identified – which means you have both piety and knowledge, as well as charisma enough to sway a Carta boss. I must admit, your current blinding oversight is even more curious.”

“Blinding oversight, my lady Nightingale?”

“You’ve been followed everywhere you’ve been in Kirkwall. He’s good, I’ll admit, but he’s not _that_ good. You’ve seen him twice and dismissed him both times. I thought to recruit you, but now? Now I am not so sure.”

“Followed?” I asked. I did my best not to scowl at her, but I’m certain I failed. The idea of being recruited by _the left hand of the divine_ , being permanently out of the grasp of my fucking father…? Whoever had ruined that for me was getting a blade in his guts.

“Brunette. Ferelden. Brushed past you this morning in the marketplace, when you stopped for a blintz.”

“Sheepfucker,” I hissed, remembering.

“Perhaps you should deal with your tail, little Trevelyan? I am quite nearly as interested in him as I am in you.”

She stepped backward, pivoted, and leapt nimbly onto the rooftop Cadash and I had just vacated. In a heartbeat she was gone.

I could follow Cadash back into Dark Town. Or. I could find the asshole who cost me the biggest break in my life. If he was following me, he was spying on Cadash, one way or the other, and Edric would want to know.

I blurred my form into the stones of the alley walls, like I’d been painstakingly taught in the Carta, and eased from shadow to shadow towards the street. It was edging towards late morning, and stealth was _hard_ , but the tall, narrow buildings in the docks cast shadows I could use. It was painstaking and slow, but I finally got eyes on my stalker.

The Nightingale’s description was good, if simple. Brown hair in a shaggy sort of cut, barely brushing his collar but doing an admirable job of masking his features. He wasn’t dressed as a _guard_ per se, but he wasn’t dressed like a civilian, either. Maybe that was why I hadn’t caught on… his clothing, at a glance, seemed unremarkable enough, but the bulk at the joints implied there was something more substantial hidden beneath… a thin coat of mail, perhaps, or maybe leather. The damning discovery was the way my eye slid past what looked like a  _dagger_ at his waist, and I realized someone had enchanted his sword to keep it hidden.

The only person I knew with access to that particular runework was my bloody father. He’d paid a fortune to buy every known copy of the plans to create it, and then had the poor Tranquil who’d discovered it, killed.

I pulled a vial from the lining of my belt, and swiped a bit of cloth from the table of a vendor selling fruit pies. I hadn’t thought to use any poisons today, but suddenly I had good reason.

It was a careful dance, to make my way across the plaza without being seen, but before the sun hit its zenith, I was behind the Ferelden. His only warning was the faint _crack_ of the vial breaking before the soaked rag was over his face and he collapsed against me. I used his momentum to propel us both backwards into a helpful alley, and through a manhole into Darktown.

We landed in a heap. He was much too heavy for me to carry by myself, but Edric had been keeping tabs on me and showed up in short order.

“Do I want to know?” he asked, resigned, as he shouldered the unconscious man.

“Nightingale meant to recruit me,” I answered, discarding the broken glass and carefully dropping the rag I’d used to disperse the ether into a barrel fire notably untended by sewer dwellers. “Said she wouldn’t, though, since I didn’t realize I’d been followed.”

Edric stumbled a step. “Followed? For how long?”

“Whole time we were in Kirkwall, she said.”

“Sheepfucker.”

“That’s what I said.”

“So this is your tail?”

“Yup.”

“And you didn’t kill him?”

“Not yet. Wanted some answers first. And let’s be honest… he followed _us_ without us knowing.”

Edric merely grunted. We trekked the rest of the way to the Carta safehouse he’d established, in a particularly nasty part of Dark Town beneath the alienage.

Rian cracked open the door at my knock, and gave me her standard scowl as she swung it wide to admit us. I didn’t know if she hated me for being human, or for being nobility, or for sleeping with Edric, but the hatred was plain.

“Brosca,” I greeted her.

“Trevelyan,” she answered evenly.

“Renew your friendship later, get the damn door closed,” Edric grumbled as he passed through.

“Collect another camp follower?” Rian asked, with a chin jerk to indicate the prone Ferelden.

“Not since you and Leske,” I countered.

“For fuck’s sake,” Edric groaned. “I don’t have time to separate you two today. Put your big girl panties on and deal with the problem at hand.”

“Trevelyan cause another problem?”

“Trevelyan was approached by the Left Hand of the Divine to be recruited,” I informed her coldly. “You remember her, right? The person who couldn’t get you out of prison because you fucked up the lock?”

“Evelyn,” Edric warned.

I continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “She had reservations, though, because this asshole has been following us the whole time we were in Kirkwall. Wasn’t that _your_ job? Make sure we were left unmolested? Serves me right for trusting _you_. How did Leliana corner us in that fucking alleyway, _Brosca_?”

“I swear, I will make you fuckers hug it out again,” Edric threatened, stepping between us. “And this time I will lose the fucking key and make you work together to get the fucking shackles off; _do you hear me_?”

“I hear you,” I answered.

“Goodness, Cadash, I knew you leaned to the kinky side, but I’m starting to think you _like_ the idea of Trevelyan and I shackled together,” Rian chided him mildly.

I didn’t laugh. I refused to admit that I wanted to.

Edric didn’t respond, and we all turned to the problem at hand.

The Problem was waking up.

His eyes were blue, I noticed as he blinked up at the three of us leaning over him. I watched the awareness slowly seep into his face.

“Well,” he said slowly. “You didn’t kill me. That’s better than I hoped for.”

It was not the reaction I expected. Cadash didn’t either, it seemed. “You expected to be dead?”

The Ferelden shrugged. “I’m technically working for the Bann. So. Yeah?”

I caught myself blinking at him. “Did you really just give that up? You’re working for my father?”

“Do I get to explain?” he asked, shock threaded through his voice. “Shit, this is going _way_ better than we thought it would.”

“We?” Rian echoed.

The Ferelden nodded, and made as if to sit up, and then paused for permission.

Cadash, who had the same _this shit is weird_ look on his face that I was feeling, gestured for the man to get comfortable. Then, surprising us all, Edric sat down on the floor to face him.

With a series of uncertain blinks, Rian and I looked at each other, looked at Cadash, looked back at each other, and then sat down on either side of our boss.

“Bann Trevelyan showed up in Highever some eight months ago,” the Ferelden started, and I felt the anger start to churn in my gut. “He said his daughter was in trouble, and altogether too clever for her own good. He’d set dozens of men to watch her, and she’d either neutralized or outright killed each one. He was convinced she knew every hired sword in the Free Marches, and he had to get some new blood to keep an eye on her. My best friend and I took the job.”

“You just sold out your best friend?” Rian asked coldly.

The Ferelden shrugged. “The story doesn’t make any sense without him. You didn’t kill me, and I don’t think you’ll kill him.”

“Why not?” I pressed.

The Ferelden shrugged. “Because we’ve been watching you for six months. I think I got you figured out.”

“Six?” I repeated, shocked.

The Ferelden nodded. “My friend was your tail in Ostwick. I was the runner. He would keep an eye on you whenever it was clear you were out with Cadash. I would run the information we thought your father needed back to the estate. When you hopped ship for Kirkwall, we figured you’d immediately spot my friend, so we swapped out and I started to follow you.”

“And I suppose your friend ran off to alert my father as soon as I grabbed you?” I surmised sourly.

He shook his head. “He’ll wait for confirmation that I’m dead first. We’ve got an agreed-upon time period he’ll wait if that confirmation doesn’t come.”

“Why are you telling us this?” Cadash spoke up.

The Ferelden grinned. “Because Bann Trevelyan is a shitbag, and my friend and I would like to work with you, instead. We’ve got a business proposal that will make all of us rich.”

*

Three hours later, there were five us seated around a table in an abandoned clinic in Darktown. The two Ferelden spies looked enough alike to be brothers, and I was again a bit distraught that I hadn’t caught on to their tail for _six stinking months_.

The one we’d caught – Glennon, his name – was doing most of the talking. “I hated your fucking father the second I set eyes on him, but it was the best job offer on the table. So we took it, and immediately questioned everything the prick told us. After about a week of following you around, we knew we would _much_ rather be working with you than against you. Whenever Trevelyan was around, the Carta only ripped off the worst of the worst. It’s not that different than what the Jennies have been doing. And that’s when we found out there was no Red Jenny in Ostwick.”

“You’ve stopped making sense,” Rian informed him.

“That’s getting ahead of ourselves,” the second, Higgins, jumped in. “The important thing is, we would wait until your father could not possibly stop you before we told him what you were doing. We would delay the guards so that you weren’t found. We’ve been helping you work for six months. Did you notice that your father stopped interfering recently? That was us.”

Glennon nodded eagerly. “And we can keep doing it. We can stay in his employ, and give him just enough information that he feels like we’re worth the money. Maybe even deliberately let him catch you every so often so he doesn’t lose faith in us. And in turn, we’ll keep him off your back. He won’t hire any other tails. One less thing for you to worry about.”

“And what do you get out of this?” Cadash asked.

“First, we’re taking the Bann’s money,” Higgins chuckled. Glennon elbowed him into silence and took over the conversation again. “Like he said, we are on the payroll. But we like what you’re doing. And we have ideas for how you could create a network completely secondary to the Carta. Cadash keeps doing what he’s doing, but Trevelyan… you could work independently. The two of you could have two noncompetitive markets and help each other at the same time. And even if you don’t… you’re stealing from assholes. We’re big fans of that.”

“What if I told you,” I countered, “that you’d impressed the Left Hand of the Divine, and the three of us could all join her? She met me in the alley and told me I was being followed; that’s how I knew to grab you, Glennon. She said she was almost as curious about my tail as she was about me. The three of us could leave with her, and put the Waking Sea between us and that prick.”

“What’s she recruiting for?” Higgins asked.

“Something the Divine is cooking up,” Rian chimed in suddenly. “That’s what I was doing rather than babysit you, Trevelyan. I found out what happened to Tethras. Seeker Pentaghast picked him up and is pumping him for information on what happened to the Champion of Kirkwall, Garrett Hawke. She didn’t like what she heard, and she’s taking Tethras with her to the Divine’s Conclave in Haven.”

The reaction that drew from the two Highever boys was remarkable. Higgins went stark white, while Glennon pushed up out of the chair and stumbled back from the table.

“There isn’t enough money in the world to get me to go to Haven,” Higgins whispered.

“What? Why?”

Glennon was just shaking his head, struck dumb.

“We had a friend,” Higgins whispered. “Joined a band of mercs and got carted off to Orlais. Writes from time to time. Before he left Highever, he told us to avoid two places. Haven was one of them.”

“And you believe him?” Rian laughed.

They both nodded. Higgins swallowed twice before offering up, “the other place he told us to avoid was Kirkwall.”

“Well, that’s pretty obvious,” I laughed.

“He told us that nearly five years ago.”

The whole thing was suddenly not at all funny. “Did he say why?” Rian demanded.

They both shook their heads, _no_. “Just got real twitchy about it. Said to go anywhere in the world _except_ Kirkwall and to stay the _fuck_ out of Haven. Chantry blew up in Kirkwall, red lyrium shit all over the Gallows, open fighting in the streets… and somehow he thought Haven was worse. I wouldn’t go anywhere near that Conclave.”

“I should warn Leliana,” I said to Cadash. For the first time in memory, Rian nodded, eagerly agreeing with me. She and Leske were two of the Nightingale’s biggest fans.

“And risk getting recruited by force?” Cadash countered.

Higgins was shaking his head again. “Not worth it. There’s nothing worth risking Haven. If you’re dead set on going, we’ll go back to Ostwick and turn in our resignation to your father. We’ve got connections in Denerim; that’s on the opposite end of the country, should be safe enough.”

“No,” I decided after a moment’s thought. “I don’t know if I believe your friend, but I’m shitty enough at facing my own fears. I don’t need to go stare down someone else’s. If you’re right, I don’t want to be anywhere near there. If you’re wrong, I haven’t technically lost anything.”

“So, what do you say?” Glennon asked, coming back to the table. “We’ll play your dad and keep you free to fuck with the nobility in the Marches?”

Cadash was rubbing his chin, deep in thought.

I didn’t wait to follow his lead. I hadn’t been looking to leave the Carta, but now that it was an option, I couldn’t imagine meekly following Cadash around anymore.

“You’ve got a deal,” I said, leaning forward and clasping each of their hands individually. “We’ll meet up in Ostwick and figure out the particulars. In the meantime… explain to me this Red Jenny business.”


	24. Escape: Two Knights-Templar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because just as every mage didn't turn to blood magic when the Nevarran Accord was nullified, neither did every Templar go on a murderous rampage.  
> Some Knights-Templar remember their core duty: protect mages from the world, and protect the world from mages.
> 
> These are two such Knights-Templar.
> 
> POV: Another old friend

“That,” Knight-Lieutenant Eamon whispered directly into my ear, “is Kaiopi Surana.”

“Why does that name sound familiar?” I breathed back. We timed our words to coincide with the wind gusts through the trees, so the rustle of leaves would disguise any errant vocalizations.

“Escaped from Kinloch. Nine-thirty. Probably assisted by Solona Amell. Some inconsistencies with her phylactery. Ser Simon insisted she was in Denerim. Tried to find her for years, but Templars weren’t welcome in the alienage. Murky sort of politics. With the Accord gone, he finally forced her to surface. She fled. Got tracked to Amaranthine. Killed _twenty seven_ Templars in Vigil’s Keep when they cornered her.”

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. We trained to lose as many as six when we took down maleficar. The losses were expected… _anticipated_ , even. To have your heart stopped by a bolt of lightning was a far better way to go than twenty years of lyrium promised. Special cases, like First Enchanter Orsino or – Maker save us all – Warden Commander Amell would have losses as high as ten or twelve. But _twenty seven_? It was unthinkable.

But, worse… more than a score of Templar slain _and the maleficar walked free_.

“Simon was slain by an accomplice, who took Surana’s body and ran. She was presumed dead by many, _hoped_ dead by others. I’ll admit to hoping. If she didn’t hate Order before, she sure as shit does now.”

“How is she still walking?” I wondered. The mage in question was nearly a hundred paces away, merely a cowled and robed elf, staffless and horseless, in nondescript homespun and with a wary way of walking. But I could _feel_ the magic radiating off of her; I could damn near _taste_ it, the earthy acidic burn of Fade and lyrium. “What did she pull through to kill so many, but not rip herself up?”

Eamon shook his head. “No evidence of blood magic.”

 _“What?”_ I hissed. The mage, across the clearing, froze. I bit my lip and tried, desperately, to still the race of my heart. No blood magic, fine, but she had to have pulled in a demon. Despair seemed most likely. She had been cornered, probably looking for the missing Warden Amell to save her once again, and found herself alone and unaided. Maker, could it be Envy? I fought desperately against a shudder. It was just Eamon and I out here… Envy would eat us alive.

Somehow, impossibly, the mage – blonde, fair, lithe – locked eyes with me from across the meadow. She cocked her head to the side, seemed to sigh, and then _fucking vanished_.

“What the-“ I moved to stand, and Eamon grabbed my shoulder, thrust me back onto the earth.

“We follow. At a distance. We won’t be able to pinpoint her, but she won’t be able to lose us, either. We need to know where she’s going, to warn any Templar in her path.”

I nodded. “What are you thinking? A ravine in the Frostbacks? Pin her in a storm?”

Eamon shot me an exasperated look out of the side of his eye. “Were you not listening to me? She killed twenty-six Templars. _By herself_. Her accomplice got _one_. We’re not setting a trap for her. We’re warning the other Templars to keep away.”

“You’re letting a maleficar _go_?”

Eamon blinked and then shook his head with a chuckled. “Apostate. Not maleficar.”

“But you said-“

“Not one sign of blood magic,” Eamon told me again, and his tone became infinitely sad. “Every body had every drop of blood still accounted for. No bloodied swords or knives. No evidence of cuts made by Surana or her accomplice, except Ser Simon, and even then… There was no evidence of demons anywhere around the path she took. Those twenty-seven Templar died trying to bring down a Harrowed mage, Aillis. A mage good enough to defend herself _without_ resorting to blood magic. What could she have been if we hadn’t chased her out of the Circle? What could Kinloch have been, if she had stayed?”

“Chased her…?”

“Story goes, she left because Solona was her only friend, and Solona… well. Warden Amell got put into a bad corner by the First Enchanter and Knight Commander. Have you not heard the story?”

I’d been too young when the Blight had swept through Ferelden, too young to be told the horrors of Kinloch when it happened, when it was discovered. It became a cautionary tale, rather than a living lesson. _They can all be maleficar_ , the Knight-Captains had told me in training. _They will all become maleficar, without us_. I shuddered again and shook my head.

“Come, then. I’ll tell you what I know as we follow. This will be a good lesson for you.”

 

*

 

The slight smell of magic in the air kept us patiently on the mage’s tail. She sped up over the second and third days, but by the morning of the fourth she seemed to understand we were as far behind her as we could, and did not attempt to close while she rested. And, as we walked the length of the Fereldan Frostbacks, Eamon told me the story of Warden Commander Amell and her friends in the tower: the man who became the villain Anders, the maleficar Jowan, and the elf known as Surana.

It was the same tale I’d heard as a youth in the monastery, but with an added perspective. Solona left because she was tasked with framing her friend, and was only guilty of doing what she was told. Rather than attempting to punish Irving, Gregoire chose to make examples of the Templar and mage left behind when Jowan ran. Had Irving done differently, perhaps Arl Eamon Guerrin would not have been poisoned. Perhaps Redcliffe would not have been overrun. And perhaps Warden Commander Duncan’s recruiting mission would have gone differently, and then a thousand what-ifs coming into play. _What if he’d recruited Wynne? What if he’d recruited Uldred? What if he’d recruited Ser Cullen? Ser Carroll?_

In the end, Irving lost _both_ his pupils, the brightest minds of their generation, and all ability to fight off Uldred when the Senior Enchanter turned. Irving’s disappointment in losing both Surana and Amell was thought to have contributed to Uldred’s rise – how else could both Irving and Gregoire have missed it?

“That was ultimately Gregoire’s failing,” Eamon counseled on the morning of the fifth day, when we’d exhausted our imaginations on _what if_. “He missed Uldred. He persecuted good mages, mages who faced unfathomable odds and _still_  did not turn to blood magic. And he sent many broken men to Kirkwall, when they should have gone to Dairsmuid, or Val Royeaux.”

“That,” a voice I did not recognize interrupted, “is not what I expected to hear from my little shadows.”

“Maker’s grundle,” I think I said, as I stumbled backward. _Where the fuck did she come from_?

“Enchanter Surana,” Eamon said evenly, taking a measured step back and lifting his hands in front of him and away from his sword, palms out in a sign of peace. “I am many things, but an idiot is not one of them. You did not turn to blood magic in Amaranthine and you are not maleficar.”

She was standing at the top of a very short ravine, likely the lowest hill in the bannorn, and seemed to have done it intentionally to appear taller, rather than intimidating. She was a good ten or twelve years older than me and about as pretty as elves get.

Which is to say, _gorgeous_.

And, I noticed a bit belated, she really did _not_ have a staff. I didn’t know what to make of that.

I also couldn’t imagine what she’d make of _us_. Eamon was tall, bordering on gangly, with freckles visible under his helm, and the promise of a shock of ginger mane if he could be talked into pulling the helmet off. I didn’t look as thin as Eamon – as he was far sturdier than he seemed – but the top of my helm brushed the base of his. My own hair was clearly visible beneath, roughly braided into a black rope that coiled helpfully between my helm and armor. We had matching green eyes that I had hoped, as a child, meant we were secretly related, that he could be my brother in truth and not just in my heart. He’d known his parents, though, and chosen the Order, while I was an infant gifted to the Chantry and never informed of my heritage, if even it was known. It was silly, but I expected people to see _foundling_ somehow imprinted on my soul, visible to any who cared to look.

“And yet you still follow me,” she reminded Eamon, crossing her arms over her chest.

Eamon took another measured step back, so he and I were shoulder to shoulder. He tossed me a worried glance, and I noticed his frown smooth. Was it because I had followed his cue and not drawn? “I am many things,” he said again, “and included in that number is _a loyal Templar_.  I would not see my fellows come to harm because of any misguided sense of revenge or self-defense.”

“Names,” she said, and I was surprised to hear the tone of command – of an adult finding two children where they should not be – replaced by something almost courteous.

“Knight-Lieutenant Eamon,” my mentor said at one. “And this is newly commissioned Knight-Templar Aillis.”

“Aillis,” the apostate said, inclining her head. “Eamon. I am pleasantly surprised to see not all Templar have lost their minds.”

“We mean only to follow you at a respectable distance and warn off our fellows from attempting attack,” Eamon said in lieu of a response. “We have no means to call ahead or behind, and we have sent no-“

“No messages, I know,” she said with a nod. “I didn’t survive this long by being a fool.”

“How long have you been watch-“ I started to ask.

“The better part of the last two days,” she replied, picking her way carefully down the hill. “Long enough to listen to your conversation and determine the wisdom of what I’m about to suggest.”

“Oh?”

She stopped within arm’s reach of Eamon, took a bracing sort of breath, and extended her hand. Eamon blinked once, surprised, and then slowly reached out to clasp his palm against hers. “Pleased to meet you, Knight-Templar Eamon,” she said stiffly. I could almost feel the fear radiating off her.

“Pleased to meet you, Enchanter Surana,” Eamon answered, as a smile slowly creased his features. “Spectacularly pleased to meet you under the banner of friendship.”

“I cannot promise friendship,” she corrected, slowly withdrawing her hand, but allowing a small smile to form to echo Eamon’s. “But we are all safer together in these times. I mean to cross the Frostbacks, and there is something heinous growing in Orlais. If you wish to follow, it is better if we travel together. I can ward your sleep, and you may stand guard over mine.”

The discussion of _sleep_ around a mage was unnerving. It sounded almost as if she was willing to trust us to stay awake while _she_ slept, which was an unheard-of concession.

“What has you so concerned about our sleep, Enchanter?” Eamon asked carefully.

“There is a Nightmare,” Surana answered, glancing uneasily to the West. “And it knows I’m coming near.”

 _Nightmare_ , I thought, and felt my abdomen clench in fear. No one slew a Nightmare; you woke, or you did not.

“You, in particular?” Eamon asked. I was, for the first time in years, glad to have a mentor. I was far out of my depth here.

Surana nodded, and then tilted her head towards the road. “They know me,” she said, but before either of us could get the wrong idea, she clarified. “I am what Irving made me: a demon hunter.”

 

*

 

It was another day on the road to the Orzammar pass, which was being hailed as the only safe way remaining across the Frostbacks. The pass that Haven crouched upon was crawling with agents of the Divine; while that wouldn’t bother Eamon or I, Surana might have been right to stay away.

The walk was filled with revelations for me. I had received my commission – and my first philter – a mere week before the Nevarran Accord was nullified. Enchanter Surana – and we called her nothing short of the full honorific – was the first mage I’d actually _met_. I’d interacted with several, of course; everyone sits through a Harrowing before taking their vows. But Surana quickly became a _person_ in my estimation.

That this was an oddity made my stomach clench with shame. I hadn’t been thinking of mages as people. Maker, maybe the war really was our fault.

Surana told us of her training with Irving, which was like nothing I had learned before. To hear her speak it, though, it made complete sense.

“A Harrowing, as you know, is designed to test a mage’s willpower, to make sure they can stomach the Fade, and to give them a taste of what a demon might offer. It is rarely so obvious a trade as power for life; often it is the semblance of a loved one returned or a wrong righted. That is only learned as an object lesson. No amount of reading can prepare a child for the offer of a demon.”

“I did not think children were Harrowed,” I offered. I was unsure of whether I was welcome to ask questions beyond the one that had started the conversation, the query as to what makes a mage a demon hunter.

“Templars take their lyrium and begin formal training when they are ready to be initiated into the Order,” Surana answered evenly. I was buoyed by the idea that my questions and clarifications would be welcome. “Mages, at roughly the same age, are sent into the Fade to fight off demons. Would you not say you were yet a child before the phial reached your lips?”

It was a hard comparison to swallow. I had learned so much since I had taken my formal vows and been given my lyrium for the first time; I still felt like a child out of my depth when listening to Eamon speak.

“It is an apt comparison,” I granted, and that ghost of a smile returned in response. It vanished as she took up her narrative again.

“A Harrowing is not a blind thrust of a child into the Fade,” she continued, “but rather a carefully planned and orchestrated affair. There must be demons of the right power and temperament for the apprentice to interact with. They must be close enough for an apprentice to find them in the allotted time, but not so close as to appear to be lying in wait. The idea is not to scare a mage out of the Fade entirely, but to encourage a sense of caution. Thus, before the ritual is offered, the First Enchanter is tasked with finding and arranging the Harrowing.”

“So the First Enchanter makes deals with the demons the apprentices will encounter on their Harrowing?” I didn’t mean for the words to sound judgmental, but I was horrified.

Surana, surprisingly, shot me another small smile. “If by _deal_ you mean we find them, bind them, and force them to our will? Then yes.”

“Oh,” I managed. The term _demon hunter_ suddenly made more sense. “So then the deal is, what? Their release in return for their participation in the Harrowing? Which, in turn, is an opportunity to possess a mage?”

“Indeed,” she replied, with a congratulatory sort of tone, and I realized she fancied herself my teacher. I glanced at Eamon, to see him grinning at me, and decided I didn’t care. Who else would get this opportunity? I was learning more in this walk with this mage than I had in two years of study in the convent.

“There were several benign spirits we would interact with, as well,” she continued, and I snapped my attention back to her words, trusting Eamon and the mage to mind the roads. "Wisdom, largely, although Valor appeared from time to time.” She frowned for a moment and then the expression cleared. “Sometimes they took larger roles in a Harrowing, agreeing to _appear_ as demons when an apprentice was particularly unruly. We could temper a mage without causing more danger than was necessary.”

“And Irving trained you to this task?” Eamon asked.

“He did. There are as many paths as there are mages, and very few are suited to this. Solona and I both had an affinity for spirits to rival Senior Enchanter Wynne, and Irving selected us early on to begin training as his eventual successor.”

“Why not Wynne?” I asked, feeling myself getting caught up in the story.

“Wynne had a wanderlust that kept her from staying long in the Circle,” Surana answered, with her broadest smile yet. “She volunteered to travel to Ostagar, and then practically abandoned Kinloch to travel with Solona.”

“She found you in Denerim, I take it,” Eamon said. It wasn’t a question.

Surana’s smile wavered. “She did. It was… incredible, to find Solona had not died in Ostagar.”

She fell silent, then, and I was left to mull over the story of the Hero of Ferelden. She had been one of a pair of survivors of the rout at Ostagar, and managed to battle both the Teryn of Gwaren and the darkspawn horde to end the Blight before it could sweep across Thedas. The rumor that the alienage had stayed largely empty of darkspawn during the Battle of Denerim suddenly had more merit, and I allowed myself to fear this diminutive mage.

I was careful, then, to not reveal myself with too many questions. My curiosity was nearly overwhelming and had no outlet but the stories this elf chose to impart. It was far too easy to get sidetracked by the want of a good story and forget that it was a mage with the blood of two dozen templars on her hands telling the tale.

I learned, as we began the long walk through the mountains over Orzammar, that she carried no staff because she had never wanted to draw attention to herself, nor rely upon its benefits. She did not use the blunt offensive capacity of a staff, and had not since she left the Circle. She said there were other ways to focus power, and reliance on a staff would have gotten her killed in Amaranthine.

Given what _had_ happened in Amaranthine, I had to concede her point. Whatever she was doing, it was working. I was careful not to prod; inquiring about a mage’s offensive capabilities was tantamount to a threat from a Templar.

Not that I had to ask; she seemed to embrace the role of _teacher_. Maybe she’d spent too long with nonmagical types. Maybe she took a shine to me. All that mattered was, she wanted to use her magic to help me, rather than reduce me to a smoking pile of ash. Honestly, I was rather fine with that.

“See how it’s not smoking?” she asked – seemingly out of no where – the second night, after she lit our campfire. We weren’t high into the mountains yet, but we were definitely gaining altitude. My calves were already burning with the effort, and it was only the first day of the ascent.

“I do,” I answered carefully.

“There are woods and powders and reagents that can reduce smoke, or change how the smoke behaves and reduce its visibility, but only magic will keep it from smoking altogether.”

I nodded, and she brandished a finger at me. “Not just campfires. Torches. Candles. Cookstoves. Always look for smoke. If you get used to looking for it, you’ll get tipped that you’re dealing with a mage long before you meet the person who lit the fire.”

Eamon was grinning broadly, and I had known him long enough to guess that it was from a rather intense sort of self-satisfaction. He’d decided to follow Surana, and now look at us… getting hands-on instruction from one of strongest mages left outside the Wardens, if not _the_ strongest mage in southern Thedas.

“Yes ma’am,” I answered her. “Fire. Dead giveaway.”

She nodded, once, and went back to cooking. Eamon and I were both rubbish at cooking – we’d survived on hardtack and jerkey up until this point – and she had taken over camp duties the night before.

I supposed I should have been leery of eating what she prepared us. I should have feigned sleep during her first watch the night before. I should have taken everything she gave me with a grain of salt.

Had it been another mage, I likely would have. But this elf, this _woman_ , had killed more than a score of my fellows in self-defense _without a staff_. If she wanted me dead, _I would already be dead_. And those weren’t rank beginners, like me, but mage hunters like Knight-Captain Simon and Knight-Lieutenant Caine. Ser Simon, of course, had been killed by whoever her accomplice was, but the idea that it was an accomplice and not a raised corpse…

I took the chance and asked. “When you were… attacked in Amaranthine,” I started, careful with my choice of words. She paused in handing me a bowl of soup, but then nodded for me to continue as I took the proffered meal from her hands. “They say you killed twenty-six Templars, and an accomplice killed the last.”

“Twenty-six?” she sighed. “I hadn’t counted.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She blew on her soup and took a deliberate full spoonful, swallowing and then opening her mouth slightly to breathe another sigh.

…proving the soup wasn’t poison. Eamon had already taken a spoonful but I quickly followed suit.

“Part of being a demon hunter is a familiarity with denizens of the Fade,” she told me, giving her soup a moment to cool. “What I should say in this instance was that the last Templar was slain by one of his own fellows, that I am a practiced necromancer and that it was Ser Caine or Ser Isaac who slew the Knight-Captain.”

She took another bite of soup while I waited. It hadn’t occurred to me that she had known the Templars who chased her, but if they had been particularly contentious in Kinloch? That Ser Simon had stalked her for years showed a personal aspect to the chase, making it a vendetta more so than a hunt.

“And I can do that,” she continued. “I know enough spirits who will gladly occupy a corpse and fight at my side temporarily that I could have raised every one of those twenty-six Templars and had them cut Ser Simon to ribbons. If I thought it would save me from him, I might have tried.”

There was something in her tone – a catch, a tremble – that confirmed for me precisely why Knight-Captain Simon had been so focused on capturing her. I thought I was through being ashamed of my Order; I was wrong.

“But there is no point to raising the corpses of Templars to fight other Templars,” she was saying, and I brought my attention back to her words, rather than her voice. “You know how to fight them, you know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I would have expended more energy raising their corpses than I would have spent _making them corpses_  and they would have been nothing more than a stalling tactic. I was cornered; stalling was suicide, when every drop of mana counted.”

“So there was an accomplice,” I concluded. She nodded.

“He was… a friend. A very dear friend. He heard I had fled Denerim and he knew me well enough to guess where I had gone. Somehow, he knew Solona wouldn’t be there…” she closed her eyes and shuddered. “He slew Ser Simon. That gave me the window of opportunity to kill the five or so left. I was so close to being… I collapsed and could not tell you how we left the Vigil. I woke up many miles away, safe.”

“What happened to your friend?” I asked. I didn’t mean to whisper, but the words came out barely a breath of sound.

“We split ways again,” she said, and if her words conveyed apathy her face did not. “He rejoined his company, and I aim for Val Royeaux.”

“Val Royeaux!” Eamon spluttered. “What? Why?”

Surana smiled at him. “That reaction is why. Would any expect me to head straight for Val Royeaux?”

Eamon snorted. “Not hardly.”

“I have a… Friend, in the city,” she said, with a strange emphasis on the word _friend_. “We have not spoken in some time, but she will not turn me away. Even now.”

“That is… a remarkable friendship,” Eamon asserted carefully. The inference was clear; Val Royeaux was home to what was left of the Circle – the _loyalists_ , they were called – and they would not hold with a longtime apostate like Surana. There would be few others in the city who would be interested in the risk inherent in sheltering a wanted rogue.

“You’re welcome to accompany me there to meet her, if you so desire,” Surana answered evenly. I exhaled the breath I did not realize I was holding; I had feared she would take offense. “She is not what you might expect, and if you have no other pressing business, she might have work for you.”

“Work?” Eamon repeated, hovering between shock and amusement.

“You don’t have to decide now,” she said, and a laugh seemed to hover just behind her smile. “It’s a long way to Val Royeaux.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't know Eamon or Aillis? They're from my other story, Higgins' Song. You can read about them [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3662928/chapters/8572543).


	25. Escape: Two Knights-Templar (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ah, but meeting up with Opie and heading west is not enough to keep Aillis and Eamon out of Theirinfall! We must find something to keep them busy for the immediate future.

By the dawn of our second week together, I had drummed up the courage to make a confession to our “charge;” although who was escorting who was a hanging question.

“You creep me the fuck out,” I told her, and she tipped her head back and laughed.

“Aillis!” Eamon chided.

“Well, it’s true,” I shot back. “Enchanter Surana doesn’t behave like any other mage I’ve ever heard of. And I don’t mean that in a negative way,” I added, turning back to address her. “I mean, it’s not just that you’re not afraid of us. You want to _teach_ us. That’s something else entirely.”

“If I can teach you something about magic that will save your life, I will,” she countered evenly. “If I can teach you to be more at ease around mages, make you less likely to condemn an innocent, I will.”

“But you’ve been hiding from Templars for years,” I protested. “You killed more than two dozen of us. Recently! You shouldn’t… you shouldn’t be this _calm_ , after what happened to you.”

She smiled, then, and it was more genuine than any expression I had seen her wear thus far. “Irving wanted me to be First Enchanter,” she said softly. “That meant I worked with a lot of Templars, knew many of the Circle Templars by name. I was taught to respect, not fear. Was I afraid in Denerim, at the end? In Amaranthine? Yes. I was more frightened then than I had ever been before in my life, more frightened than when the Templars came to take me away as a child. But I learned something in all of that. I learned how to run, when to run, _where_ to run. I learned not to rely on anyone to save me, not because I don’t have friends who would, but because _shit happens_ and they can’t always be where I need them to be. I got lucky, this time. I will not rely on luck if it ever happens again.”

She reached out, tentatively, and patted me on the shoulder. “Had I seen you in Denerim, I would have hidden. To be fair, when saw you at first, I _did_ hide. But you did not advance and did not flag. I eventually collapsed out of exhaustion, deciding to get a few hours rest and fight you when you neared, but you didn’t. When I circled back, it was your hesitance to approach that inspired me to listen. If you are willing to show respect to me, child, I am willing to show respect to you.”

I was with her until she called me child. I couldn’t stop the scowl from sweeping over my features, but it seemed that was Surana’s intent, and she danced a step away and laughed as Eamon’s chuckle sounded from ahead. “Child,” I echoed, outraged.

“My human friend I call _shem_ , I assumed you’d prefer _child_. And it serves you right, for _ma’am_ ing me for the last four days. _Ma’am_. I need not be made to feel any older than I already do.”

I mulled it over for a bit, and decided to take another risk. “If you calling me _shem_ means I am considered a friend, then I wouldn’t mind it.”

“You asked for it, _shem_.”

I grinned at her. “And what I am I to call you?”

“Enchanter Surana will suffice.”

Eamon’s full belly laugh echoed against the stone lining the pass as I reflected upon the impossibility of enjoying being mocked by a mage.

The positive mood lasted maybe an hour. As we came out of the mountains, now firmly upon the Orlesian side, Eamon threw up a hand and stopped us both.

“Bandits?” Enchanter Surana sighed.

“Sure looks like it.”

Surana straightened. “Shall we follow the forms, then? For this first encounter, at least?”

“A formal disclosure and tactics preference would probably be best for Aillis and I,” he agreed.

“Very well. I’ll skip the bit about relative strength and Harrowing, since you probably know that.” Eamon nodded as we both turned to face her, loosening our swords in their scabbards and swinging shields into position. We traveled light, but we each bore a pack that needed to be strapped tightly into place and then accommodated for. “I am a necromancer, with a focus on _heat_ … fire, high pressure, friction. I will avoid lightning, for obvious reasons, unless I can be sure to avoid hitting you or there is absolutely no other option. I prefer single encounters to sweeps and so I will be close with the enemy.”

Eamon snorted. “So you’re the opposite of Solona Amell.”

Surana quirked a smile. “More or less.”

“Fair. Permission to engage, Enchanter.”

“Have you ever gotten to say that before?” she asked, smirking as a reddish glow appeared around her hands. The lyrium in my veins sang with the sight, and the burn of magic in the air became stronger.

“Nope. Pretty fucking cool.”

“Happy to be of service.”

There was a _twist_ in the air over her shoulder, and a tiny pinprick of light appeared. It wasn’t stationary, but rather bounced chaotically.

“Aillis, Eamon, this is Joy. She is a minor wisp, great at parties, and even better at watching my back. Her purpose is observational, only.”

“Eyes in the back of your head?” Eamon asked, stomping the last of his gear in place.

“More or less,” Surana replied. Then she pulled phials from her belt and tossed them to Eamon and I. It was pure reflex to put a hand out and catch it – but the delicate blue glow made my heart stutter.

“I would sincerely regret if either of you did anything stupid with that and I was forced to kill you,” she said, with absolutely no malice.

“We have lyrium,” I told her, not bothering to hide my shock. Mages having enough lyrium to _give some to a Templar_ was as ludicrous as being gifted a fifteen-ton purple mabari.

“You have a tightly rationed travel dose,” she countered. I wasn’t sure how she knew about Templar lyrium supplies, but she wasn’t wrong. “If you have need of it in this battle, if they have a mage or, Maker save us, an abomination in their midst, call for me to clear the area before you cleanse. And in that case, use this rather than your ration.”

“If this isn’t prepared by a-“ Eamon started to say.

“It was prepared by Alistair Theirin,” she countered, and I saw Eamon’s jaw snap shut at the same time as mine. “I stole it from Solona’s stores in Amaranthine. She had them rather precisely labeled. It was what I was doing when Simon finally cornered me; it was why I was in the Vigil and able to be caught.”

Eamon slid the phial into the _ready_ slot on his belt without another word. I followed suit. I was young when Alistair won the right of Conscription from Warden Commander Duncan, but that tournament had fueled my fantasies for the last decade. It was why I went ahead with becoming a Templar, rather than staying in the Chantry as a sister. It was everything I dreamed the world could be, burning with glory in one perfect memory.

With that image in my mind, I charged up the lip of the ravine with Eamon. I glanced back to see Enchanter Surana had utterly vanished.

“She didn’t include _invisibility_  in the disclosure,” I complained to Eamon as we circled around behind where the ambush was likely waiting.

“Saw it in the field,” he countered. “Super common trick in the Circle. Or, it _was_ , back when there still was a Circle, I guess.”

I didn’t have any more time to argue, as we came around a bend in the game trail we followed and emerged at the top of a shallow ravine. There were five lightly armored bandits crouched in wait directly below us, and four more on the opposite side of the road we had been walking down.

We were less than the span of a man’s arms away, but they had no eyes for us.

The largest of them – on the other side of the road from us, big enough to have been Avaar - turned red faced and reared up awkwardly. He clutched his chest, opening his mouth to speak, to shout, to cry out, to say _something_ , and then he pitched forward against the man standing next to him, collapsing bonelessly.

There was silence for a moment, and then he _exploded_. His arms and legs stayed largely intact but his entire torso erupted outward, bits of bone turned to shrapnel that pierced the three men around him. Their skin was scalded by the man’s blood, which _bubbled_ and _hissed_ on the ground as if boiling. The entire pack was dead almost instantly. Two of the men standing beneath us turned and fled, not stopping for supplies, not looking back; they charged down the road and out of sight. The other three seemed frozen in shock.

Eamon dropped off the lip of the ravine sword-first and got the tip of his blade between one man’s helm and armor, twisting to slice through carotid and jugular both. I copied as best as I was able – my mentor was far smoother than me, still – and severed my target’s spine, killing him instantly while Eamon kicked aside the bleeding man he’d landed upon. As I worked my sword free of vertebrae, Eamon swung his shield into the last man’s face just as he started to react to his brethren dying around him. The bandit stumbled backwards, flailing, and Eamon slid his sword into the armhole of his flimsy chainmail and punctured his heart and lung. The bandit collapsed in a fountain of blood and the fight was over.

“What the fuck was _that_?” I asked as Surana sedately picked her way around the worst of the carnage, mindful of not getting any blood on her boots.

“I told you: heat, high pressure. I turned his heart into a furnace, heating and pressurizing his blood, and trapping it in his lungs. The larger the person, the more blood they have, and the longer it takes to build up to critical mass. I believe it is called _walking bomb_ in your texts, but that’s rather a misnomer.”

“I… didn’t think that was allowed in the Circles,” I managed, rather lamely.

“It’s not,” Surana answered, with a mild tone to match the sedate way she was picking through the bandit’s gear. “But then, neither is most other magic. We had to use flint and tinder to light the lamps.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that; the idea that _Enchanter Surana_ was more apostate than Circle mage bothered me more than it should. All mages were apostates now, with the arguable exception of the so-called loyalists following Enchanter Vivienne de Fer in Val Royeaux. If this magic kept her alive, kept _me_ alive, and wasn’t powered by blood or demons, was it actually something I could reject? Was it my place, as a rank-and-file Templar, barely out of training, to make that judgment call? If my mentor wasn't bothered by it – and he hadn’t flinched, honestly – then shouldn’t I let that guide my ethics?

“What part of it bothered you?” Eamon asked, when we’d gone some distance down the road. We’d passed the bandit’s camp, ransacked it, and found no sign the two runners had so much as paused there in their flight.

“I’m not sure,” I answered him honestly. “I’m… having a harder time than I thought, integrating what I’m learning from Enchanter Surana with my teachings from the Chantry and the Order. Specifically, in the use of magic as a weapon.”

“You didn’t like her killing the bandit?” Eamon asked carefully, “Or you didn’t like the _way_ she killed the bandit?”

I shook my head, unsure.

“If she had killed him with lightning, would you be bothered?”

“I don’t know.”

“If she’d drawn a sword and killed him, would you be bothered?”

“No,” I replied after a moment to consider.

“This, then,” he said, glancing back to see Surana had fallen respectfully out of ear shot, “is the way you need to think of it. Magic exists to serve man, yes?”

“Yes.”

“It is a tool, then, for men to use, just a sword is a tool, or flint and tinder is a tool, or even lyrium is a tool. Lightning is not at fault when it comes down from a storm and strikes a man dead, and thus neither is the lightning at fault when it comes from a mage’s hands and strikes a man dead. The task of the Templar is to protect a mage from the temptations of demons, and to protect the populace from mages who have not the morality to use this tool they have been given with care and discretion. Any tool can be misused; a sword can be turned against the innocent, and even a healing potion can kill a man with a closed head wound.”

“Magic is not the problem,” I enunciated carefully, watching my mentor’s face as I came to my conclusion. “The problem stems firstly from demons, and secondly from immoral men.”

“Correct,” Eamon agreed, putting one hand briefly to my shoulder. “Now, let us extend this lesson to Enchanter Surana. She used her tool to fight the same group of men we did: bandits capitalizing on the chaos in Orlais to prey upon travelers. She did not use blood to power her spell. She did not strike a deal with a demon and become an abomination to kill them. She used elemental magic, simple physics, and took out half the bandits in such a way that did not harm to her allies. She warned us ahead of time of her skills and strengths, and even gave us the means to fight _her_ when she handed us lyrium. She has acted without censure, and therefore, has proven her moral compunction.”

“But-“

“But,” he conceded with a nod, “many mages who become abominations do so after long and otherwise irreproachable lives. Uldred, for example, or First Enchanter Orsino. This is the core reason why the Circles were formed, to allow for a lifelong protectorate, rather than merely passing a mage through their Harrowing and leaving them free.”

“It does not feel right,” I said slowly, yet struggling with the concept, “to look upon Enchanter Surana with suspicion, given her history.”

“And that,” Eamon said, in a voice far older and sadder than his years should claim, “is precisely the crux of the entire argument.”

“Oh,” I breathed. “So you’re saying there is no right answer.”

“I’m saying there are as many right answers as there are people,” he countered with a laugh, and the sobriety of a moment before was forgotten. “Surana there has _chosen_ to travel with us. Now, if this Nightmare she mentions were to overpower her in her sleep-“

“A soul is not forced upon the unwilling,” the mage in question interrupted, having caught up as Eamon and I hit a rough patch of ground and had our steps slowed. “Nightmare would not _overpower_ me. He would require my express permission to possess me, and I learned a very long time ago the power of _no_. Unlike Templars, demons always seek consent.”

“You mean to say every abomination _asked_ to become one?” I did not attempt to school the incredulity from my tone.

“If ever you chance upon Solona Amell, Alistair Theirin, Cullen Rutherford, or the other scant survivors of the horror of Kinloch,” she replied in that same infuriatingly even tone, “ask them how they got out, how _any_ one got out. They will tell you the same. Uldred tortured everyone in the Harrowing chamber _until they said yes_. If you never said yes, you were tortured to death. But, by the Maker, you died _whole_.”

I closed my eyes and shuddered. Death would be preferable to abomination, unquestionably. To fear death more than you feared the loss of humanity was an alien concept to me… but perhaps that’s why they were called _abominations_.

“When I die,” Surana said into the silence that followed, “be it as an old woman in an overstuffed chair with my tea growing cold in my hands or in a bloody mass of pain and fury, I will die as _me_. I put far too much time figuring out who I was to abandon me for an empty existence or a moment’s respite.”

“What do you mean, Enchanter Surana?”

She flashed me a look and then sighed. “My name in another time was simply Kaiopi. Call me Opie, if you will.”

 

*

 

We stopped sleeping as the road wound down into Orlais. It was insidious at first; restless nights, poor choices of campsites, traffic on the road and poor weather. After the fourth solid night of insomnia, Surana gave a name to what ailed us.

“It is the Nightmare,” she said, on the morning we reached the fork in the road outside Lydes. “He does not hunt us, not directly; his prey is inexplicably specific.”

“If he does not hunt us, why can’t we sleep?” Eamon countered. It was, perhaps, the grumpiest I had ever heard him. Eamon did not fare well on short sleep.

“I won’t let you,” Surana answered simply. “Not deeply, not until I am sure.”

“You cannot keep us from sleep.“

“I can keep you from the Fade,” she countered. “I can keep your mind from brushing it as you sleep, but you two are both alarmed by the interference and as you attempt to dream, you rebound awake. It is a good trait to have, if uncommon. Most do not realize they’re being kept from the Fade.”

“I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you,” Eamon sighed.

“If we take the ferry to Val Royeaux, rather than take the road through Verchiel, we will reach the relative safety of the city sooner, and you will find your rest again.”

“Deal,” Eamon grunted.

Ferry traffic in and out of Val Royeaux was a mess. Two Templars were highly sought after as passengers, though – everyone hoped it meant the Order was returning to Val Royeaux – and we secured a trip in half the average time. Surana, without a staff or particularly magelike clothing, was assumed to be our servant or page, and passed without remark. If her smile twisted sardonically, it was nothing I could fault her for.

I might have judged her for killing Templars, for wielding magic, but the rest of the world was content to judge her just for being an elf.

I had dreamed of coming to Val Royeaux. The city was one of the wonders of Thedas, a miracle of architecture and sophistication.

It smelled like every other city in Thedas. It was infested with beggars and cutpurses. We were in the marketplace for a less than an hour when I saw a man piss on the statue of Andraste. He was chased off, but four more did it once I knew to look; they were just stealthier about it than the first. There was a fucking _gallows_ in the marketplace, right across from a bit of lion statuary that was covered with plaques from sponsoring nobility.

It was the extreme rich continuously juxtaposed with the desperate poor.

I immediately, venomously hated it.

Surana spent the better part of the first afternoon walking around town, looking down every alley and up every street, although she wouldn’t tell us what she was looking for. Right as twilight fell, she strode unerringly up to a seemingly abandoned building, propped herself in the doorframe, and tapped a strangely specific pattern into the panel closest to the latch. She waited, and then tapped again. I noticed the way she was standing was keeping the door tightly shut; one hand on the latch to keep it from lifting, the other hand lifted to tap out her pattern, and all her body weight pressed upon a certain spot in the door.

I tried to keep the surprise from my face when a responding tap sounded faintly from the other side. It was too soft for me to make it out aside from it not being the same pattern as Enchanter Surana’s.  After a moment, the door cracked open and Surana had a whispered conversation with the person on the other side. Then the door slid shut and Surana slid back into the street, Eamon and I at her heels. I looked back to see a slightly discolored spot on the door, right where Surana had leaned on it to keep it closed, and thought I understood what she’d been looking for all day.

“What the shit was that?” Eamon asked, rather uncharacteristically blunt. He had no love of Orlais.

“Wait for it,” she replied, jerking her head to indicate we should follow.

We were in a completely different part of town, then; nearer to the alienage and the dismal wreck that was the outskirts of Val Royeaux. Surana led us, still, although her steps were more cautious. She cast glances back at us constantly, but I got the idea that she wasn’t worried if we were still following her; she was concerned that we stuck out like sore thumbs.

If I’d carried a giant sign that said _Templar_ we wouldn’t have been more obvious.

Surana led us down seedier and shadier alleys until we reached a dead end behind what _had to be_ a brothel. There were three doors at the end of the alley, one on the far wall and one on either wall perpendicular to it. Surana chuckled to herself at some joke I couldn’t perceive, and tapped on the door opposite the one I guessed was the back door to the brothel. She took the same stance as before – wedged in the door frame, body weight centered on a specific point, hand on the latch – and tapped the same pattern as before. It was full dark by this point, and no lamps lit this alley. Surana had cupped a minuscule amount of fire in one palm to light our steps but even that was extinguished as we waited with our backs to wall.

Almost immediately after Surana tapped out her pattern, a response was tapped back. Surana whispered something through the door, and then waited.

A few minutes later, a different tap sounded, and Surana bounced a bit in the most blatant show of happiness I’d ever seen from a mage. She quickly settled into place and tapped her own pattern into the door frame. There was silence for a moment, and then she danced away from the door. She stood between Eamon and I, bouncing from side to side, as a series of locks were released inside the door, a heavy bar lifted, and then light flooded the alleyway from the cheerful interior of the derelict building.

“Opie?” A woman’s voice asked, with a Ferelden accent. It was not what I expected, in an alley in Val Royeaux.

“Sera!”

“Maker’s nut, what are you- get in here!”

“I’ve got new Friends,” Surana warned, putting hands out to indicate Eamon and I.

“Yeah, yeah, if you didn’t want ‘em they’d be dead, innit? Get ‘em in here too!”

We were swept into the bright lamplight of the building, and the door immediately closed and bolted behind us. Our hostess – Sera – turned after dropping the bar in place and fixed Enchanter Surana with a face-splitting grin.

She was an elf, maybe my age, dressed in ragged too-bright leathers with jaggedly cut hair and the sort of smile that could only be described as _impish_. When Surana made the introductions and our hostess turned that smile on me, I only had one word for her.

Trouble. This elf was _trouble_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAYHEM


	26. Escape: Durin Aeducan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Durin Aeducan survives his banishment from Orzammar and spends some time in Denerim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to write Durin's story! This should have come out forever ago, when I first mentioned him in Will to Live.

“I did not kill my brother,” I said, putting every ounce of feeling I possessed into the words.

“I believe you, son,” Pyrel said. “I do. But you’ve been found guilty in the Assembly of Deshyrs and I have to abide by their decision.”

“Tell my father,” I begged, throwing dignity to the wind. “Tell him I _did not do this_. Even if there is nothing he can do, do not let me go to The Stone with his censure.”

“I will tell him,” Pyrel promised, and I felt myself drop to the floor of the cavern.

“I cannot wish upon you the warm welcome of the Stone, as you are casteless and banished,” he announced in a louder voice for the benefit of the assembled guards. A glance assured me none of them were any of mine. “Your road is your own.”

“Ancestors guide your steps,” I bid him as he turned away. He paused mid-step, recovered quickly, and walked away. There was nothing to keep me from following them back to Orzammar – nothing but pride and the knowledge I was banished.

Casteless.

“Fucking _Bhelen_ ,” I spat, pushing myself to my feet. I did not need to follow; Pyrel Harrowmont had paid me one final service, a tiny act of defiance against the Assembly in favor of the second son of his oldest friend.

He had dropped me in Aeducan Thaig, the old stronghold of my House, rediscovered only recently...

...by me.

I knew _right_ where I was. I knew where ancient armor was hidden, too heavy for us to carry home from a scouting mission, tucked behind the corner of a decrepit building. I knew where there hung a shield with my family crest and a mace once wielded by Paragon Aeducan, himself.

It took less than an hour for me to fit myself in the armaments of my House. It took twice as long for me to decide which route I was going to take out of the Thaig.

If I walked the Deep Roads back towards Orzammar, I risked being discovered and killed by my kin.

If I walked the Deep Roads _away_ from Orzammar, I risked being discovered and killed by spawn, spiders, night stalkers, ghouls, and any number of unknown, unnamed denizens of the dark.

Ultimately, I started down the road Pyrel had followed when he left. I went slow, listening for any sign they’d left lookouts to stall my progress.

I was barely past the first intersection before I found a dwarven scout. I gritted my teeth and hoped he didn’t attack; if it was him or me, it was going to be him. I had little desire to kill a fellow dwarf, but I had less desire to die in the Deep Roads.

“Durin?” the lookout called, and I froze.

“Gorim?”

“What are you _wearing_?” my second – former second, now – demanded, striding over to meet me. “You had me second-guessing myself about whether or not it was you, and whether I should give up my position and-“

“Why are you here?” I asked him, as he slowed down and realized I hadn’t lowered my shield.

He put his palms up and immediately went down on one knee. “I am your second, Durin,” he answered. “They banished me to the surface for that crime. I owe no allegiance to anyone but you.”

“Thank you,” I said, accepting his fealty. “But why are you _here_? Why did they let you come down here?”

“They didn’t,” he scoffed. “Stone-blind fools. They set me outside the gate, shut the door behind me, and expected me to lay down and die. Surfacers living just outside the gates gave me shelter until night fell, answered my questions. Not the first time they've seen someone tossed out of the city. Once I got my bearings, I walked away from Orzammar and immediately found half a dozen well-worn trails that took me right back underground. The smugglers don’t bother with the Deep Roads, they drop down right into Orzammar. It didn’t take me long to find an entrance that got me just outside the city, and from there I followed Harrowmont when he brought you down.”

“What’s the point to the gates, then?” I asked, shocked.

Gorim shrugged. “Careful maintenance of hierarchical boundaries, if I had to guess.”

My mace drooped, and after a moment I let my shield follow suit. “You aren’t here to kill me, then, and regain your honor?”

“I’ve already been on the surface,” Gorim reminded me solemnly. “I no longer exist, as far as the Shaperate is concerned. There is no honor to reclaim.”

“I’m sorry, my friend,” I said as I dropped the mace into its loop on the belt of the ancient armor and rested the emptied hand on his shoulder. “If Bhelen wanted the throne so badly, I would have _given_ it to him. There was no reason to drag you into this.”

“Can we agree to never mention your brother again?” Gorim asked, in a tone I suspected was more in line with what I could expect in the times to come – not entirely lacking in deference, but with only the respect owed to an equal, and not a sovereign. Regardless of what we once were, I would never be King of Orzammar.

“Agreed,” I grunted, and Gorim cocked his head to indicate a side-passage. “Come on. Let me introduce you to the sun.”

“Do you have to?” I groaned, and Gorim laughed. “I’m afraid so, my friend. I’m afraid so.”

He led me up – and up – and _up_ – and eventually out. There was a square of light ahead of us utterly unlike any I had seen before.

“Slow down,” he said, and although his experience on the surface was laughably brief, mine was nonexistent, and I immediately bowed to his better judgement.

“It will blind you if you go too fast. Ease into it. When you can see, take another step.”

I was still twenty paces from the opening in the earth when the light became too bright to bear, and I backed up a step in pain.

“How does it not burn the eyes from the surfacers’ sockets?” I demanded.

“We could just lob you into it, like they did to me,” Gorim countered, and I shot him an apologetic glance that he waved off. The admonishment stuck, though, and I made a conscious decision to whine less. Not that I’d ever been much of a complainer, but it had always been Gorim’s ears that my discontentment fell upon; those days were past us now.

I took a steadying breath and then began measured paces into the light.

When the light-blindness cleared, I was standing on a ledge on the side of the mountain I had lived my life within. The world was bright and green and _vibrant_ in a way I couldn’t immediately process. Everything I could see _moved_ , dancing in the air that was anything but still. The sky stretched above us, blue and endless, and I reminded myself of the lessons of the Wardens about _gravity_ and how everything falls _down_ , even on the surface. I could not fall into the sky, even if I wanted to, even if it looked like nothing more than the great lake I’d found when I had been trying to locate the lost Tethras Thaig.

“What... what now?” I gritted to Gorim. My teeth were clenched. My eyes were slitted. My whole body was braced for impact.

“Welcome to the surface, Durin Aeducan,” Gorim Saelac told me, somehow managing it without a trace of irony. “Now we get to figure out the rest-of-our-lives nonsense.”

“Great. Lead away.”

“Never did I think to hear you say that.”

“Yes, well, you will always have been on the surface longer than me. The best way to break me of command is to relieve me of it. You’re in charge now, congratulations.”

Gorim snorted. “What are you, then? My bodyguard?”

“Sure. Why not. Is there some place less bright we could have this conversation?”

“Yes. It’s called _night_. Give it a bit and the sun will move behind the mountain, and it will be more like home.”

I waved for him to get on with it, and then followed him, blindly, off the mountain.

 

*

 

How had I never noticed that Gorim was a smooth talking, woman-wooing con man? My eyes hadn’t fully adjusted to the light yet and already he was in betrothal negotiations with the father of an admittedly buxom surface girl. The surfacer was an armorer, specializing in converting dwarven goods from Orzammar into forms usable by the taller races. She was a tailor in her mother’s shoes, doing the fine stitch work to accompany his smithing. There was already a son learning his father’s craft – what they needed was a salesman. Gorim’s first pitch at the girl’s affections was all her father needed to see.

“And who is this?” The older dwarf asked, canting his chin at me. “New to the surface or I’m an elf.”

“Brand new,” Gorim confirmed. “An old friend who ran into some trouble. I pulled him out the Deep Roads and he’s agreed to be my man-at-arms.”

They had already finished their business at the bazaar outside Orzammar, and ran into us on the road just out of earshot of the city gates. My “death” in the Deep Roads hadn’t hit the callers yet, so it was possible they didn’t know I was an Aeducan.

...as if the name meant anything anymore. Nothing I stood for meant anything on the surface.

“So you sign on with us and we get a sword, too?”

“Yes, ser,” Gorim agreed.

I Have almost no memory of the trip across Ferelden that spring. I didn't even know what spring  _was_ at that point, so I had no context for the pale green shoots fighting up from the dirt and detritus. I was continually astonished by the  _movement_ everywhere: the trees moved, the grass moved, the  _dirt moved_ as it was blown by the wind and washed by the rain. I had to learn how to tell the difference between latent movement and humanoid movement; merely watching the still stone for breathing or twitching would never be enough up here. I had an entirely new respect for surfacers by the time we crossed the county; which was good, since I was one, now.

When we got to Denerim, Gorim was married and I became a permanent afterthought. I found myself losing entire days to the sun, sitting in the marketplace and managing to look menacing. That was all it took to pay the bills; Gorim was _my_ man-at-arms for so many years, he knew damn well how to fend off a pick pocket. Between my glowering and Gorim’s clever fingers, his father-in-law’s market stall put up record profits.

In the face of a Blight, all the trouble in the alienage, and the Fereldan Civil War? It was a near miracle.

I wasn’t content with my lot in life, but it seemed content with me, so I let it be and tried to imagine myself in the Stone.

At least, until the elf found me.

She was blonde and probably passed for pretty, as elves go. I figured she was unarmed and not a threat, and in the past had rarely given her more than a once-over.

“You look bored,” she told me one bright summer morning, long after all excitement from the Blight had died down.

I grunted a response.

“You _are_ bored,” she laughed. “Do you want work?”

I grunted noncommittally again. I’d seen enough of her kind to know she didn’t want what we were selling, and she didn’t seem dumb enough to try to pawn dwarven armor as her own. She was neither thief nor customer, so she wasn’t my problem.

“We’ve got a tunnel infested with spiders,” she continued in a low voice and I felt the muscles around my abdomen clench. The idea of being _underground_ again was almost more than I could stomach. I reevaluated her status - she wasn't my  _problem_  but she might be offering my  _cure_. 

“I could clear it. My Friends could clear it. But _you_ could clear it, and I would see to it you got paid,” she continued in the same nonchalant tone. “I bet you’d do it faster, more efficiently, and _enjoy_ it more than any of the rest of us. It would have no impact on your work for Gorim here. It’s not a contract or an obligation. Just a little Friendly networking, and a chance for all of us to make some money. I’m slipping a piece of paper into your armor here, see? You follow those instructions if you decide you want something else to do one of these nights. No rush.”

She was gone before I could will my hand to move.

There were tunnels beneath Denerim.

Spiders or no, I needed to know where they were, where they _went_.

I wasn’t meant to be away from the Stone.

As soon as night fell, I was in the alienage, tapping on the door indicated on the little slip of paper.

The elf from the marketplace opened the door, a handful of fire in her cupped palm.

Mage, then; I was bound to run into them eventually. I waved a dismissal at her hand; I didn’t need the light.

I never needed the light.

With a smile she extinguished it.

“Where’s this tunnel?” I asked, brandishing the new armor Gorim had gotten made for me, keeping the armaments of my namesake safely stashed away.

“There’s actually a lot,” the elf answered. “If you’re interested in some longer term employment, we’re looking for someone to map out _all_ the tunnels snaking around Denerim.”

“We’ll talk terms later,” I insisted, fighting to keep the desperation out of my voice. “First things first. The spider infestation. Where is it?”

She smiled, gestured me into the house, and shut the door behind me. Then, with a brief flare of light she exposed a hidden door on the opposite wall. She popped it open and waved me down. “This one is clear,” she said as I stumbled gratefully into the darkness. “I don’t think you’re going to listen to me, so here’s the instructions on how to find the spiders we need killed. This tunnel is a straight shot, ending in-“

“Give me,” I said, snagging the instructions from her proffered hands. “And shut the door behind me, I need my dark vision back.”

“Do you have a name?” she asked, closing the door but for a gap where she’d stuck her head.

“Durin.” I answered, feeling the weight of the earth around me and suddenly more secure than I had been in months. “You?”

“Ophelia,” she answered. “I’m glad I thought to ask you about this.”

“Me too,” I sighed happily. “Me too.”

“Happy hunting, Durin.” With that, she closed the door and I was, finally, Home.

 

*

 

There were dozens of tunnels under Denerim. It took me most of the year, but I mapped them out one by one: start and end points, length, depth, branches. Ophelia and her Friends thought they were all straight shots but I had managed to find at least two hidden side tunnels in every last one of them. They didn’t connect – not directly – but the branches led down to a deeper cavern system that, in turn, led to the Deep Roads.

I could not venture far – the Roads, even here, were overrun with ‘spawn, and I was but one dwarf. The way to the surface was difficult and unmarked, and while I had faith that they could find their way up if they truly wanted to, there was no point. They were moving again, shuffling off towards Orlais, heeding the song of the next arch demon and ignoring Denerim. What I did see of the Deep Roads beneath the city indicated I was just a touch north of the old kingdom of Gundaar.

As badly as I wanted to venture deeper, it was suicide. I made my way back to the surface, hesitating at the last door as always.

The surface was where I lived, now, but the Stone would always be Home.

And so it went, for years. Ophelia slowly pulled me deeper into her acquaintance, and introduced me to both her Friends and the concept of Red Jenny. I became the unofficial caretaker of the Denerim tunnel system, and it was a lot in life I could more easily swallow than Gorim Saelac’s morose bodyguard.

Surfacer politics continued to baffle, and never moreso than when Ophelia arrived at my door in the middle of the night.

“Durin! I need help,” she hissed. I grasped her wrist and pulled her inside. She was oozing haste, and I could almost smell her fear.

“The Templars left the Chantry,” she managed between shaking gasps. “Revered Mother has no power to restrict their sweeps of the alienage; she’s been giving them limited searches over the years and always with enough time for me to be well away but tonight... tonight there was no warning, _no warning_ and I just barely made it out and there’s no one to call them back. They won’t stop, won’t stop until I’m found.”

“They’ve always stopped before when you weren’t found,” I reminded her, leading her away from the door and deeper in to the little ground-floor apartment Gorim’s father-in-law had given me. I’d worked for eight months to build an escape hatch in the floor, and I pulled her to the closet where it lay hidden.

For me, it was an escape from surface.

For her, it was a way out of the city.

“They’ve always been a part of the Chantry before now,” she explained, patient with me even through her panic. It was a big part of why we were friends. “They were allowed a search but the Revered Mother protected the alienage; she and Arl Finn and Bann Shianni worked together to keep us safe but the templars broke their leash. They’re not part of the Chantry anymore. The listen only to the Lord Seeker and he’s told them to kill all mages found outside a Circle and annul any Circle that does not immediately recognize his authority as ultimate. Simon _saw me_ , he knows I’m here, he won’t stop. He will never stop.”

“So kill him,” Durin shrugged. “Or die trying. I’ve never seen you _afraid_ before, Ophelia.”

“I do not fear _death_ , Durin,” she answered, and her sudden calm was enough to rattle even me. “There are far worse fates awaiting me than _death_. By the time he is finished with me I may be too far gone to know death is an option.”

I nodded. I didn’t understand – I might never – but that didn’t mean I couldn’t respect her wishes.

“I need a map,” she said. “Even if you just spare me a glance at one, I need to have some idea of where I’m going. There’s a tunnel that goes the direction I need just a few blocks from here and I-“

“I can do you one better,” I interrupted, leaning down to slip my fingers into the hidden catch in the paving stones that made up my floor and knocking free the counterweight keeping my trapdoor closed. It swung open silently. Ophelia managed to not look completely boggled – but only just.

“I had no idea... why didn’t you... _oh_ you sweet man _you are the best_.” She threw her arms around my neck and about squeezed the air out of my head.

“Yeah, yeah. Shove off,” I grunted, breaking free and swatting at her. She didn’t seem to believe my grumpiness was genuine, which was well enough. I stepped across the room – really, it was only three steps – and flipped through a stack of papers. “Here, I’ve been working on copying my map. Keeps me busy when I don’t have enough spare time to justify a trip down. Take the page you need, I can replace it easily enough.” I found the sheet I wanted and pulled it free of its fellows, rolling it up and passing it to her.

“You’re a literal life saver, Durin.”

“Yeah, yeah. You get caught with that, you stole it, you hear? I haven’t seen you in six weeks, since the dog job.”

She planted a kiss on the top of my head and dropped gracefully through the open hatch without another word. I swung the door closed behind her and went right back to my bed. There was nobody who could find that trap door who wasn’t a dwarf, and there wasn’t a dwarf alive who’d join the _templars_. If she was followed – and I sincerely doubted that, the girl was as sneaky as a rogue – they could search my little hovel if they wanted to. I rolled over, unconcerned, and was back to sleep within minutes.

The templars never came. The city was in an uproar for three days until the Arl stepped in and declared the search “an inflammatory farce” and threatened to ban templars from the city altogether.

Gorim told me a few mornings later that the Knight-Commander’s reply was essentially _you wouldn’t dare_.

To which Arl Finn said, _just you fucking watch_.

The proclamation was on every street corner in Denerim, and I pulled a copy down on the off chance I ever saw Ophelia again. I knew she’d love to see it.

 

**Effective Immediately, by the order of Finnegan Cousland, Arl of Denerim:**

**Due to recent unrest and the fundamental right of all citizens to peace and freedom from fear: any person appearing to be a mage or a templar will be immediately arrested and removed from the city walls.**

**Only Tranquil are to be excluded. No exceptions made for rank.**

 

In tiny letters at the bottom, it read:  _Should the Lord Seeker wish to visit Denerim, he'd best not be in his armor_.

I didn't know if it was accident of printing - the scribe mistook a side comment to be included on the main document - but I suspected that was the point. Plausible deniability, Opie had called it.

There were twenty-seven arrests of Templars made the next day, including the Knight-Commander. Any impulse she had to fight the Arl over his order vanished when Queen Anora approved the use of her soldiers to enforce the new ruling.

A week after Ophelia fled, Denerim was bereft of templars. They, ultimately, gave up the search when she wasn't found... in Denerim, at least.

And I...?

I wondered if I shouldn’t have gone too.

Her brief appearance in my house that night had shaken something free I had long since forgotten.

As a youth, I had frequently suited up and disappeared into the Deep Roads. Gorim and I would go in search of lost Thaigs or map out forgotten routes. My own escape from my brother’s treachery was due to my wanderlust, and my discovery of the old Aeducan Thaig.

I found myself spending more and more time cleaning and repairing the Aeducan armor I’d removed from the Thaig that last day. My new armor was polished and put away, pristine, and my other pursuits were slowly eclipsed by the memories dredged up by the heavy set of plate.

The morning Twitch showed up at the stall with news of Opie’s continued well-being was the last morning I spent in Denerim.

She’d made it. She’d gotten through the caverns and escaped Denerim ahead of the templars. She’d let herself be cornered in Amaranthine, I learned later, but the idea of flight from the city was now entrenched in my soul.

Gorim hadn’t ever needed me, not like I once had needed him.

I took one completed set of maps with me, and left the rest in a cleft in the stone just below my trap door. As the sun set over the city, I slid beneath its streets and into the Stone below.

I wasn’t welcomed back into Orzammar. I could accept, now, that I never would be. I wasn’t dead yet, and the Legion was too far out of reach, besides. But there were others out there who needed someone who didn’t fear the Deep Roads, and I was finally ready to Join them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the weirdness in the post. The first chapter that went up was broken and the easiest way to fix it was to delete it and start over. It's better now!


	27. The Dwarf on Her Doorstep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Durin finds who - and what - he's looking for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A new POV I haven't tried before! This one called for me getting up at 0400 when my muse was displeased with the result and wanted me to rework it before she would let me sleep.

 “There’s a dwarf on our doorstep.”

I spared him a glance from the letter I was writing. I could rule Amaranthine from Soldier’s Peak, but that didn’t mean I _wanted to_. I didn’t need Anora’s approval to leave someone else in charge, per se, but the notification that I intended to was, really, the least I could do.

"I need to finish this first," I said, and turned my attention back to the desk.

It was a new exercise I was working on. Magic was easy; I couldn't really remember the last time controlling my mana wasn't effortless. I don't know how much Valor had to do with that, but he sure hadn't hurt. Everything beyond magic, though, was a little bit slapdash. 

Instead of only bringing out The Warden Commander when I absolutely had to, I decided to practice that persona whenever I was working on official business in my office. Sit in this chair, be the Commander. Commander face. Commander calm. Commander poise.

“One of Dryden’s boys noticed him when they were coming through with supplies," he continued as if I hadn't spoken. "Told Howe about it yesterday. He took Oghren down to take a look-see, and Oghren insisted they bring him up.”

“I need to finish _this_ first” I said again, dipping my quill into the ink pot and carefully tapping it to _just_ the right amount of ink for my signature. That was the key to a consistent signature, I’d found: always starting with the same amount of ink.

The Commander was Calm. The Commander was Cool. The Commander was Collected. 

Cool. Calm. Collected. Composed. Compartmentalized. Capable.

"Conniving, Contrary, Coy."

It took me half a second to realize Alistair had taken up my inner monologue and  _fucked it up_. I slapped my free hand on the table in frustration.

“He’s not talking much, and definitely hasn't introduced himself, but Oghren recognized him. It’s Endrin’s second son.”

I had slapped my hand  _onto the unblotted paper_. I'd smeared ink all over my hand! I lifted it carefully and stared at it in building frustration. My right hand started to shake as I clenched the pen and I realized - far too late - that I was sprinkling ink droplets all over the page.

The letter was ruined. 

I snapped my eyes up to Alistair to see him sitting in one of the many armchairs in the office, idly cleaning his fingernails.

"Bhelen's brother. What was his name? Denton? Dune? D-something."

I meant to shout something meaningful, or at least something that was a  _word._  Instead the sound I made was animalistic and absolutely not what the cool, collected, calm Commander would do.

Composure be damned. I stood and brought my left foot up to the seat of my chair, stepping onto the desk with my right. With my next step my left foot planted on the lip of the desk and I  _launched_ at my Warden Constable.

He was, sadly, completely prepared for my attack. He stood at the same time as I did, planted himself, and plucked me out of the air. We spun across the room and I felt my back smack against the wall. He had his hands on my hips and my feet were dangling some distance above the floor and _I lost again_.

Maker, how I loved it when I lost to this man.

His mouth was at my neck and I gripped his shoulders to keep myself from sliding down the wall gracelessly. "Finish your letter, my love? Wonderful. So the dwarf-"

“Bhelen’s dead brother the murderer is alive and _here_? You’re shitting me.”

“I would never shit you,” Alistair deadpanned.

“So it’s a ghoul.”

“So it’s an Aeducan,” he countered gleefully, tilting his head up so our eyes were level. My neck immediately lamented the loss of his lips. “We met him in Denerim, actually; he’s been there this whole time, working for Gorim Saelac in the marketplace.”

“Son of a bitch,” I breathed as Alistair relinquished his hold on me and let me drift down the wall. “What is he doing here, now?”

Alistair shrugged. “He wants to talk to you. Said he had news you’d want to hear.”

I scrunched up my nose and then matched his shrug. “Worst case, it won’t be the first time I was lied to by a dwarf. Haul him up.”

Alistair beamed at me and vanished. We had runners – Soldier’s Peak was too damn big not to – but he liked to do even the most menial tasks himself. Anything to distance himself from his narrow brush with regency, I supposed. Alistair wanted to do _anything_ but give an order, even if that meant he carried his own chamber pot.

It was, ultimately, why he’d made me Warden Commander after Ostagar, when we were the only two left in Ferelden.

Asshole had taken three years before he’d even been willing to voice a contradictory opinion. And now he was sabotaging my attempt at respectability just for shits and giggles.

I couldn't help but grin to myself as I pulled out another sheet of paper to begin the letter to Anora anew. There was no better way to tell someone they were fine the way they were than by fucking up their self-improvement campaign. Maybe I wouldn't worry so much about my Commander Face when I was alone with my Wardens.

I had to laugh as he bounded back into the room – an endless font of energy, he was – with a dwarf at his heels that I definitely recognized.

"Commander Amell," he said as Alistair stepped aside. "Thank you for seeing me."

“Andraste’s asshole, you look just like your brother Bhelen,” I sighed. “Why didn’t I notice that when you were working for Gorim?”

“I just cut my hair,” the older Aeducan grunted. “It was longer when you met me, and between that and the helm you couldn’t see half my face.”

“Fair enough. What do you want me to call you?”

“You can start with never mentioning Bhelen in my presence ever again."

I tried to be annoyed but honestly I couldn’t fault him. I felt the scowl I’d attempted to fix on my face be chased away by a smirk and I settled on neutrality instead. _At least pretend you've got some composure, Solona._ “That will be difficult, given our relationship with Orzammar, but I will do my best. You didn’t answer my question, though.”

“Durin,” he introduced himself gruffly. “Durin Aeducan, though they stripped me of caste and clan when I was framed for my brother’s death. Just Durin, now.”

“Alright, just Durin. What brings you to Soldier’s Peak?”

“Ophelia Tabris,” he replied, and I felt the muscles of my abdomen clench as I leaned forward, although whether from fear or rage I wasn't sure. Probably both. “Friend of yours, yeah?”

“Yes.” I had to work to relax my jaw enough to answer.

“Templars came looking for her,” he started, and I was out of my chair and across the room before he could get any further in his retelling.  _Composure ain't happening today_. 

“Skip to the end,” I gritted.

“Got away clean, with a friend named Twitch.”

I sagged with relief, feeling Alistair’s arm snake around my waist to keep me upright. I leaned my head against his shoulder and took long, slow breaths until I stopped shaking. She’d promised me she would be fine in Denerim, she’d _promised_ -

“How many people would have died if that hadn’t been my answer?”

“As many as it took,” I replied, steadying myself and stepping away from Alistair. “I apologize for my manner, I-“

“Nah,” Durin cut me off with a dismissive wave. “There’s a reason they call you the Hero of Ferelden, and it isn’t because of any speeches. It was because you killed what needed killing.”

I turned to Alistair, but he was a step ahead of me. “I’ll find out what happened,” he said quickly, and then left me with another man who could have been King.

“I would like to hear whatever you can tell me about Ophelia,” I told Durin, gesturing to the chair Oghren seemed to prefer. I couldn’t ever get comfortable in the thing, but maybe it was built for dwarves, so I kept it in my office just in case. I returned to my seat on the opposite side of the desk and intended to finish my work on the letter to Anora about my arldom. “But first, what can I do for you?”

“I want to Join,” he answered without hesitation.

My hands froze and I looked up to meet his gaze. He was dead serious.

“As a warrior of Orzammar, hailing from a line of kings, I assume you know the cost of being a Warden?”

“You assume correct.”

“And yet you wish to Join because...?”

“If it is the only way to return to the Stone,” he told me flatly, “it is a fair price indeed.”

There was so much in his eyes, in his voice – too much. I had to close my own eyes against it. I had heard of the longing for the Stone but I had never seen it. Oghren had taken to the surface like a duck to water, but Durin?

Durin was homesick in a way I could never comprehend.

“There is a ritual required,” I told him, clasping my hands together on the desk and giving him my full attention. He deserved no less. “I do not like to perform it for just one person; it is too costly, too difficult. It might be some time before I have another recruit to-“

“I’ll wait,” he shrugged. “I’ve got no where else to be.”

“Welcome to Soldier’s Peak, then,” I tried to keep my voice light and utterly failed.

He had a story for me; the sort of story that spans years but is told in only a handful of incidents and leaves hints at a thousand more in its wake. He told me how he met Opie, how they’d worked together in Denerim, how she’d introduced him to the caverns beneath the city and he’d repaid the kindness by showing her how to use them to escape. He told me about the conversation he’d overheard between Twitch and Gorim in the marketplace, and I felt myself breathing easier with every word.

I’d been furious with Alistair for giving gear away to some hack in the Chantry until I’d met Twitch for myself. He had a focus that was rare, maybe unrivaled. I wasn’t sure what Twitch's goal was, but Opie seemed to be helping him reach it, and that made her inviolate for as far as he was concerned. I’d seen him unconsciously put a hand out when I had reached for her; anybody who was willing to try to protect Opie from even  _me_ was okay in my book.

When I’d left Denerim, she’d promised she would be safe. I’d helped stack the deck in her favor; between Shianni becoming a bann and Anora giving new rights and protections to the alienage, all she had to do was keep her damn head down. Her cousin Senna – who I’d liked immediately – had built a ring of armed and angry women around her, and Opie was building up a network of Friends outside the alienage that she’d assured me would protect her. She stopped carrying a staff, she didn’t use magic in public, she studied in private and used the tunnels to get around...

...she’d become my opposite.

The two of us were _meant_ to be together. Irving had seen us for what we were and meant for us to complement each other, complete each other. She’d been my best friend for as long as I could remember for that exact reason; if we weren't both enamored of  _men_ we could have had the perfect relationship.

But then, when the Blight was over and I left for Amaranthine, I’d left her behind.

Left her where it was _safe_.

Just to have her rooted out and chased by _fucking Simon_.

To hear it, Twitch had proven to be every ounce the solid investment Alistair had seen in him, and had come back from whatever merc company he’d enlisted with to win Opie free. Hopefully he’d hacked Simon to bits in the process.

Alistair's report a few days later gave me some satisfaction on that end. The wanted poster he brought me was a shitty rendition of me, a pretty solid image of Anders, and a dead-on _portrait_ of Opie. Creepy. The massacre of more than two dozen templars in Amaranthine came to light a short while later, and I had to wonder what would have happened had there been Wardens in the Vigil... I could have left a force of warriors there, and still moved the mages into the safety of Soldier's Peak. I chewed on the thought for two weeks before I got confirmation of Durin’s story, in the form of a letter from Opie.

_Loner,_

_Why the bloody fuck weren’t you in Amaranthine? You flaming asshole!_

_Simon came for me; I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about the Nevarran Accord. He ignored everyone who tried to rein him in and was going to burn the alienage to the ground to smoke me out. Shianni appealed to Finn and Anora but I didn’t stick around to find out how that went. There’s a Friend of mine who has been mapping out the secret routes through the city and he helped get me out. I headed straight for Amaranthine to find you, just like I promised I would if I got into more trouble than I could handle._

_AND YOU WEREN’T FUCKING THERE._

_So, fuck you very much, I ransacked your stores. Tell Alistair he has very neat handwriting, I know you wouldn’t be bothered to label lyrium that precisely. Simon cornered me just outside your stockroom with a fuckload of templars and they damn near got me._

_I’m not kidding, Solona, they very nearly had me. It was almost Senna’s wedding all over again._

_Twitch, somehow, got to the Vigil just as I ran out of mana and distracted the last half-dozen long enough for me to swallow one of your potions and I got off the best chained lightning of my life before passing out. I stayed awake just long enough to see Simon’s head bounce down a set of stairs; it made me think of you._

_So, promise kept; I told you my Friends would protect me. I’m with Twitch now, in Redcliffe. We’re on our way to meet the mercenaries he’s signed on with. I hear they have a Dalish mage in their midst, and it might be entertaining to see how her training has differed from mine. I'm becoming resigned to the idea that Twitch won't come with me to Val Royeaux, although I intend to ask before I leave. No harm in putting it out there, right? He says I should have left Denerim with him, and while I don’t think he was right – we accomplished so much these last years – everything is better when he’s around. You liked him, right? I know Alistair did._

_Let me know you get this, okay? I need to know that you know I’m not in Denerim anymore, and that you’re still safe. There were as many bounty posters for you as for me and for Anders... there aren't many spirit healers left anymore and they would love to take you two out of the running._

_love always,_

_Opie_

 

I went looking for Durin the next day. I’d had a long talk with Alistair regarding my concerns about Weisshaupt and the results of Avernus’ work with the red lyrium sample Anders had brought us when he fled Kirkwall. There was no reason to risk the knowledge of the Wardens being handed over to cretins like The Architect, not when we could serve for twenty or thirty years and then be cured before the taint overtook us.

Weisshaupt was hiding something; they had some kind of agenda, and I meant to find out what it was.

Durin was sitting in the small room he’d been assigned over the stables pending the results of his Joining. We hadn’t brought in any more recruits, but the time to wait was over.

“This afternoon,” I told him when he answered the door. “My office.”

“Yes, ser,” he answered, and I turned on my heel. I didn’t hear the door to his room close, but I didn’t spare him a look back. I had shit to do.

“I’m leaving,” I announced to the mess hall as I leaned over the railing on the landing.

My Wardens went silent and turned their full attention to me.

“Warden-Constable Howe is taking over control of Amaranthine. A contingent of Wardens will accompany him back to the Vigil and reestablish our presence there. The rest of you will continue the fortification of Soldier’s Peak. You accept no command but my own, Alistair’s, or Howe’s, or their specifically designated alternate, is that understood?”

“Yes, Commander Amell!” they thundered in return.

I turned and went back up the stairs, following the path that would take me to my office where Durin would soon arrive to partake in the Joining, Maker save him.

 

*

 

“I’d like to come with you,” Warden Durin told me the next afternoon. He hadn’t regained consciousness quite as quickly as Oghren had, but nobody had before or likely would again.

“There are caves in these mountains, Durin,” I answered without looking up from my packing. I had an open-door policy with my Wardens; once you Joined the Order my office was your office. “Oghren’s going with Howe back to Amaranthine, I need you to stay here and delve the foundation. Find out how deep it goes. Learn your limits with the darkspawn and get the feel for being a Warden.”

“I’ve done that,” he started to protest, and I set aside my writing kit and stood.

“You have _not_ ,” I interrupted. “Charting caves and Deep Roads as a Warden is _completely different_ than doing it as a regular dwarf. You were good before, you’re _unreal_ now. We might not be in a Blight but there is still a great deal to learn about the taint you took upon yourself. Someday _you_ might be the senior Warden, maybe even the Commander here, and you need to know _everything_ so you can pass it on. At one time there were only two Wardens in the whole bloody country, and neither one of us knew our elbow from our asshole when it came to the Blight. We almost lost everything, and that _cannot happen again_. The knowledge passes to _everyone_. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, ser.”

“Good man.” I turned back to the pile of gear I was working to stuff into my packs. “Keep Alistair in line. You have more in common than you think.”

“He’s not going with you?”

I paused, hands tightening on the book of blank paper I took with me for writing letters. There was a pressed rose between its pages; I never went anywhere without it.

“No,” I replied. “No, he is not.”

Durin stayed silent, but I felt his censure, sensed his unspoken question.

“There are other things amiss,” I said softly as I pushed myself back into motion. “Too many things amiss. I have good people here, honest people, trustworthy people... but Alistair...? Alistair is different. I want him with me, always, of course. But I need him to shoulder the burdens I can’t. I cannot do everything by myself; my whole life has driven that point home. Alistair is my senior Warden, believe it or not, and whatever I cannot do, he will.” I tucked the last of my things into my pack and flipped the flap closed, tightening it down before straightening and forcing brightness into my voice that I didn’t feel. “Besides, absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?”

“If you won’t take him, take _someone_ ,” Durin insisted.

It was not the stance I expected of him. “Why is this such a sticking point for you?”

“I’d never seen Opie scared before,” he confessed, and the statement shook me more than I cared to admit. “She said what she was running from was worse than death. And I know you’re tougher than an ogre in full plate but you’re also one woman in a world full of templars gone mad. You might be a badass but you’re not a fool. And, no offense ser, this seems damn foolish.”

“Why would I take you, then?” I countered, crossing my arms over my chest. “Don’t you want to get down into the Deep Roads with a pack of Wardens? Isn’t the Stone what you’re after?”

“I've been watching what you're packing. Tell me you’re not going underground and I’ll call you a liar.”

He had me there. All I could do was laugh. “I am no liar. You know what? I want to tell stories about Opie to somebody who can tell me some I haven't heard yet. I’ll take over your education myself. Go pack, I’ll tell Alistair about the change in plans.”


	28. Blackbird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Solona Amell, upon her first trip to Denerim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is for [chanterie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chanterie), who has repeatedly requested more out of my DA:O crew in this universe. Many minor changes from canon to accommodate multiple living could-have-been-Wardens running around Denerim.  
> Also, this was not meant to be this long. Well over 8K. Budget some time.

I had spent the majority of my life trying to imagine what Denerim looked like.

There were no good descriptions in books. Authors assumed people knew what a city looked like; even Genetivi wrote for the general populace. Nobody included the sorts of descriptors a cloistered girl would need to picture something as antithetical to her own existence as Denerim was to Kinloch.

“Are you alright?” Alistair asked, his voice just low enough for my ears and none others, pitched to carry over the plodding hooves of Bodahn’s mule and the resolute whistle of the wind across my face. We could hear better than the rest of our party... being a Warden had to count for something, after all.

I shook my head. “Somebody once told me that I was born in Denerim,” I confessed, in the same low sort of tone. Zevran would probably know I’d spoken, but even his elven ears wouldn’t be able to pick my words from the wind. “I’ll never know, I guess. I’ve got family somewhere in the world, right? Parents, maybe? Something? I might walk past relatives here and never know. I’ve always wondered what Denerim was like, for that reason. I never found a good description in a book, though Maker knows I looked. Opie told me what she could, but she didn’t remember enough to suit me.”

Alistair merely nodded. His half-sister was here, after all. He’d done years of work to find her address, putting him just barely above me in points in the _figuring out your family_ game. As bastards go, he was doing pretty well, actually.

Not that there was any point to the endeavor for me. Unless the Divine decided to change all the rules about the identities of children taken by the Chantry – or somebody tore down all the Circles, why not go ludicrous when considering the impossible – I would never know anything more about myself than that, for some reason, I was given the surname _Amell_.

“Your friend is here, though, right? Opie?” Alistair, true to form, was looking for a silver lining, some way to cheer me. Bless his stupid face.

“I sure hope so,” I answered, letting myself feel a bit of the hope oozing out of him. “I’ll admit to checking every burned-out caravan we’ve passed, and none have looked like they might have been hers. I’m prone to thinking she at least made it to Denerim. Whether she stayed is anyone’s guess.”

“Should that be our first stop, then?” he pressed, encouraged by my smile. “A quick jaunt through the alienage?”

“That would not be the most inconspicuous thing we could do,” Zevran offered, entering the conversation now that our voices were less guarded. “I mean you no offense, but neither of you could pass as even elf-blooded.”

“I dunno,” I rubbed my chin and ostensibly considered the shape of Alistair’s ears. “Master Theirin here might have a drop or two.”

Zevran snorted, although his eyes narrowed as he seemed to consider it.

“Do _not_ call me that, Solona,” my senior warden hissed. “Especially not in Denerim.”

It was my turn to snort. “I’m not _stupid_ , Alistair. We’re still an hour from the gates, at least. There’s nobody here to hear-“

“Three,” Zevran countered.

“Excuse me?”

“Three more hours to the gates,” he clarified.

I glanced back at the walls rising slowly against the horizon. “Three? No way. We wouldn’t be able to see it yet.”

The Crow tugged on my braid and smiled indulgently. “Just wait and see, my country mouse.”

He took my fist to his ribs with a huff of protest and a long laugh. Alistair eyed our hijinks sideways, and I wondered – not for the first time – what exactly about my friendship with Zevran made him uneasy.

I didn’t let it bother me for long, not when there was another husk of a caravan to investigate – also not Opie’s – and long run of bear traps to traverse. Leliana and Zevran made a game of disarming them, while Alistair and Sten just threw rocks at every patch of ground that seemed suspicious. Neither approach seemed more useful, which is to say everybody found a metric assload of bear traps.

“I wonder if we won’t be responsible for a population explosion of bears,” Wynne mused.

“Or bearskarns, if we fuck this up,” I countered.

“Have faith, child,” she chided gently. “You’re doing far better than even I had hoped.”

I sighed. It was hard to be negative in the face of Wynne’s steadfast trust. Morrigan, perched on my shoulder in raven form, managed to roll her eyes and ruffle her feathers in a way that seemed unrelated to Wynne’s statement.

I knew better. I tapped her beak, smirking at her glassy black eye to let her know I was on to her game. She made a half-hearted attempt to bite my finger, and I laughed. The witch of the wilds and I shared a deep mistrust of the Circle; while I couldn’t bring myself to disparage Wynne, and the elder mage had agreed to take me under her wing and continue teaching me the art of healing, I also couldn’t deny my fascination with the apostate shapeshifter who liked to settle into the crook of my neck where my staff rose over my shoulder.

What would Opie think of her?

Why was it taking so _fucking_ long to get into Denerim?

“Maker’s moustache, how tall are those fucking walls?” I asked, some two hours later.

“I told you so,” Zevran laughed.

I landed another fist to his ribs. He didn’t both to dodge; we both knew I wouldn’t hurt him.

Alistair shot me another sideways glance, his eyebrows quirking down so quickly I wasn’t sure I even saw it. How could he still mistrust Zevran, after everything?

Leliana was singing, then, and the concern for my fellow Warden disappeared again as she taught me a song about an overachieving nug who got himself eaten.

It was the three hours Zevran promised – almost exactly – before we finally reached the massive southern gate to Denerim. I’d been in awe of Redcliffe, but Denerim was every bit as foreboding and a hundred times as large. A thousand times, maybe! How could so many people live in one place?

“Remember,” I told Sten and Wynne as we neared the massive stone edifice. “We’re Solona and Alistair. We’re not Wardens. You haven’t seen any Wardens.”

“I am well aware-“ Wynne started, but Sten interrupted. “What honor is there in denying oneself?”

“Discretion is the better part of Valor, my friend,” I said with as much patience as I could muster. “This is why we won the war.”

“I fail to see-“

“Yup,” I agreed, clapping his arm and walking away. “I noticed.”

He bristled, but he’d come around after we got called out and damn near killed a time or two. It was inevitable, really. _Somebody_ in this town would know who we were.

There was nothing for it, though. I had to find Genetivi, to find the Urn, to save Eamon, to get someone with some clout to call a Landsmeet, to kick Loghain in the dick before the archdemon Blighted the whole fucking Valley and was free to shit-can Orlais.

The sad thing was, this clusterfuck nightmare was _still_ a better deal than being in Kinloch. I shuddered to remember the last time I’d seen the Tower, and put it quickly out of mind.

Yet another good tiding to bring Opie. Would she be glad Cullen had survived? Or would she take more comfort in that he had been damaged? Given everything, I leaned towards the latter, but I suspected she would be more apathetic.

We weren’t in town five minutes before learning that, yes, the people drawing the wanted posters had gotten better since Zevran had been given the job to kill us, quickly followed by the knowledge that _the alienage was closed_.

“What can you tell me about the knife-ears being locked in?” I asked a hulking sort of man who was glaring at the closed gates of the alienage as if it offended him.

He looked at me, startled, and I realized I’d misread him. He wasn’t glaring at the alienage; he was glaring at the _closing_ of the alienage. Good job, Solona. Next time just punch him in the taint, it’ll be easier to smooth over. And here I thought I was using the correct colloquialism.

“Arl’s son, Vaughan, happened,” the big man grunted, and then pushed off the wall to walk away.

“A moment, my friend,” Zevran said, smoothly stepping between me and the retreating denizen of Denerim. “What my utterly tactless but gorgeous and deadly comrade here was actually inquiring was lost by her abysmally poor word choice. Is there anything more you could be convinced to tell us?” There was, somehow, a rattle of gold in the air, although Zevran’s hands hadn’t moved and his purse was as hidden as ever.

Where did he have coins hidden, that he could jingle them at will like that?

Actually, no. Nope, don’t want to know.

I bit my lip and ducked my head, aiming for _abashed_ rather than _inappropriately amused_ but whether the big man had seen my slip was really not of any consequence. He already thought I was an elf-hating shithead; there wasn’t much I could do to repair the rotten first impression.

The big man – huge, really... as big as a human could get, which was massive if you didn’t know any Qunari – glared at me over Zev’s shoulder and shook his head. “I’ve got no information for the likes of her.”

“I deserve that,” I admitted to the back of Zev’s head.

He swatted at me. “Silence, heathen,” he shot over his shoulder, and then appeared to completely forget me. “You are a good man, I see. Guarding the gates, perhaps? Yes? Concern for someone within who has captured your interest? Some fine slip of a girl? Perhaps a devastatingly handsome rogue, like myself? Tell me. Who could I carry your regard to inside?”

He blushed. This giant motherfucker was a hand and a half taller than Alistair and he _blushed_ when Zev leaned conspiratorially towards him.

Unbelievable.

Zevran reached out and ran a single fine-boned, calloused finger down the man’s arm. “Perhaps there is no one who holds your regard? Maybe you would take some other form of payment, no?”

He turned all the colors of the sunset in quick succession and then turned his eyes to the road. “No. I- no. Nothing like that, no. Just... just some Friends on the inside, got me worried. Is all. Not going to say anything to anyone who might make it worse.”

There was something... off... about the way he said the word _friends_. Like it had a completely different meaning in his language than it did mine, although we were both using the common tongue.

Zev reached behind him, grabbed my arm, swung me around to his side, spun me on my heel, faced me away from him and his target, and then thrust me away. I staggered five or six steps and almost fell to the cobblestones, but Alistair appeared in time to catch me before I made a complete ass of myself.

“Did the assassin just _push_ you?”

“In town for less than an hour and I’ve already alienated the populace,” I answered, resting my forehead on Alistair’s always-forgiving shoulder. “Zev’s trying to win over somebody I just pissed off. I’m no good with people, Alistair. I suck at this.”

“You’re doing fine,” he countered, running his hands down my arms to squeeze my wrists and then leverage me back upright to face him squarely. “And even if you weren’t, you’re doing far better than I could. Andraste’s ankle mole, even your insane recruiting of Zevran is working out in our favor, if he can do the talking for us both.”

“You would say anything to keep from having to be in charge,” I accused.

“Yes,” I agreed with a quick nod. “Absolutely. Even better it was _Sten_ than me.”

“You’re better than you think, you know,” I countered.

“I... what?”

“I have befriended the great man Brue,” Zev announced as he swaggered into the alley Alistair had pulled me in to. “With no thanks at all to your graceless mouth. I can think of far greater uses for that tongue than angering potential allies.”

“Oh?” I couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up to my lips. The man was ridiculous. “And I can think of better uses for _yours_ than talking shit on your salvation.”

“Oh?” he echoed, his smile almost predatory. “Shall we investigate these tasks?”

“Next time I have a chamber pot to clean, I’ll let you know.”

He snorted and shook his head. Alistair seemed to relax minutely, and it occurred to me that maybe he was worried I was sleeping with Zev?

But that’s ridiculous. I mean, I was crazy enough to befriend a man sent to kill me. I was no where near crazy enough to fuck him. Why would he even...

Maker’s mistress, he was jealous.

I turned to let my graceless mouth make another ass of me when Zevran, again, saved me from myself.

“Your friend, her name is Opie, yes?”

I snapped my head around to stare at Zevran. “She... yes. She would be going by the name Opie.”

“Well then. You and my burly acquaintance share a commonality. He is being watched, but someone else, someone unknown? That someone could slip in over a poorly watched wall and gain information on what is transpiring inside the alienage.”

“Alright,” I agreed easily. “We can go tonight.”

“You?” Zevran chuckled and shook his head. “You do not have a stealthy bone in your body, and you refuse to let me give you one. I will go, and report back.”

“Opie will render you into tallow without blinking if you don’t have me with you.”

“I think I could-“

“You’re wrong. You’re dead wrong. Ask your friend.”

The giant of a man – Brue, his name, apparently – was standing surreptitiously at the mouth of the alley, listening in to our conversation while trying to appear as if he wasn’t blatantly eavesdropping. Zev half-turned as Brue glanced my way, shrugged, nodded, and then looked back into the crowd.

Zevran sighed, a sound of resignation only trumped by Alistair’s abject annoyance. “You are just bound and determined to leave me in charge.”

“You know it, handsome.”

Okay, so I flirted too hard. He flushed scarlet, looked profoundly confused, and then nodded absently and toddled off to report back to the rest of the group. A raven I hadn’t noticed before then dropped off the edge of the roof above me as soon as Alistair was out of sight, settling into place on my shoulder.

“Do not think for one moment that I don’t realize you’re only so mean to him because you’re appalled by how attractive he is,” I told the bird. She squawked in outrage, which only served to confirm it was, indeed, Morrigan. “Are you coming with us to meet Opie?”

A much more approving squawk followed her attempt to bite my ear, and I laughed and turned back to Zevran.

“You will never meet two stealthier mages,” I told my assassin friend.

“As much as I pray you are not wrong, I know better. Try not to get us both killed, yes? I have found I am becoming fond of living.”

 

*

 

We found the wall Brue had informed us was our best way to enter the alienage with little trouble. I had managed to never tell Zevran about the trick Opie and I had learned as apprentices in the Circle to maintain a minor illusion of absence, and he was genuinely offended.

“Such secrets!” he chided when I explained that the casual observer who glanced down the alley we occupied would see an empty alley, rather than two people and a bird. “And here I thought we were past the point of secrets.”

“What did I tell you about thinking?”

“Touché.”

“Get up there and toss me a rope.”

“Rope,” he scoffed. “Brasca! I haven’t had to use a rope to ascend a wall since I-“

“Less sniveling and more scaling,” I interrupted.

With a continuous rumble of complaint, Zevran propelled himself up the stone wall, poorly repaired masonry crumbling to fall in a gentle cascade to the cobblestones. I pressed against the alley wall to be sure nobody looked down with more than casual interest and fucked the whole thing up. Morrigan flapped noisily to the roofline and cawed at the guard who paused in his slow patrol to search for the cause of the disturbed mortar. I watched as he tipped his chin up to follow Morrigan’s progress, and then dismissed us with a shrug. He turned back to his patrol route and vanished from sight.

“As brilliant as you are bitchy,” I praised the raven when it returned to my shoulder in case the ruse would need to be repeated.

She landed the bite to my ear this time, and I felt the trickle of blood down my neck. It was all I could do not to laugh. Then a rope slithered down out of the uncertain twilight and I set to following in Zevran’s path. A bit more of the loose masonry rattled down the wall but no guards appeared to investigate. I pulled myself to the top, swinging over the edge, and bringing the rope with me as I dropped down the other side. I took a bit of the heavy coil to the side of the head as it snaked down the wall, but we weren’t too worried about attracting attention inside the alienage. We only knew which wall to go over; Brue hadn’t gone so far as to describe where Opie lived.

“If you mean her well, you’ll find her. If you mean her ill, she’ll find you,” he had informed me with a shrug. “Her cousin doesn’t take kindly to anyone who’s too free with the phrase _knife ear_.”

“Stop right there,” a voice ordered as I finished stowing the rope in my pack. Zev had flatly refused to be responsible for it.

“Go tell Opie that Loner is looking for her,” I demanded immediately. I wasn’t going to give this the opportunity to go south. “We’ll happily sit right here and shut the fuck up but if you don’t tell Opie I’m here, she’ll be _pissed_.”

“I don’t take orders from _shems_ ,” the voice – feminine for sure – shot back.

“How about Wardens?” I countered.

There was silence for a moment, a whisper of a breath, and then a single scuff of bootheel on a loose cobblestone. I shrugged and continued settling my pack. Zevran spun around to still me and I slapped his hands down.

“She’s gone,” I sniffed. “I’ve got make sure everything breakable is secured before Opie gets here.”

“Breakable? I thought you came along so that no one _got_ hurt. And how could you know she is gone? Not even _your_ ears are-”

Morrigan glided off the wall, fluttering down to settle into the crook of my shoulder she preferred. I carefully lifted her and set her on Zevran’s shoulder instead, cutting off his complaint. She stiffened and _glared_ at me, the expression only improved by its identical twin on the Crow’s face. I snorted a laugh and opened my mouth to comment when a muffled shout put my companions on edge.

I pushed past Zevran and planted my feet, turning slightly to my left to meet the direction of the incoming charge. I could hear her footsteps pound down the street, growing louder almost comically fast. Then, right at the corner of the building, out of my sight, they stopped.

I counted to three in my head, trying to control the grin that spread across my features. I failed, miserably, but damnit _I tried._

The top of a blonde elven head peeked briefly around the corner, disappearing immediately.

“They said you died at Ostagar,” the voice of my oldest friend called softly from just out of sight.

“Duncan died,” I answered. “And the others... all the others. I was spared, with one other, by pure dumb luck. An accident of coincidence, really. We weren’t with the army when it was lost, and so the story _is_ true. All the Wardens with Cailan were killed.”

Silence stretched. I didn’t turn back to spare a glance at Zev and Morrigan, trusting them to stay still.

“How do I know it’s you? How do I know you’re not Envy, not Desire or-”

“You and I both know damn well you wouldn’t see _me_ from a desire demon,” I chuckled.

There was another pregnant pause. “Wouldn’t I?”

“Um. _No_? How about _fuck no_. How about _no fucking way on Thedas, no.”_

Her voice broke, lightly, but it was a laugh. “No? There was that one night in the library.”

“That was Petra, you twit.”

“Oh, Maker, Loner, _it is you_.”

She appeared from around the corner and dashed at me. I put my arms out and caught her as she flew into the air to give me a strangling sort of hug.

“I got here and they said the Wardens killed the king and Ostagar was lost and my cousin... something horrible happened to my cousins and I killed some of the Arl’s men and they tried to retaliate and I grilled those fuckers, Loner. Every last rat bastard who came in here was meat. They couldn’t find me. They sent in templars and Senna picked off half the unit, one by one, until they pulled out and just sealed the alienage. They were going to just let us starve and we were running out of options but you’re here! You’re _here_ and Maker’s mistress you’re alive. Everything is possible.”

“Easy, girl,” I laughed. I wanted to deny that there was anything I could do. I wanted to tell her there was a price on my head and my team was a motley crew of assholes. I wanted to tell her I was just a glorified herder of cats; turns out I was apparently a dog person and horribly ill equipped for the task at hand. I wanted to tell her that there was a Blight, that I was just one step down a long and convoluted pathway towards an insane attempt at saving the world. I wanted to tell her Duncan had died before telling Alistair or I the first thing about being a Warden, and we had no idea how to actually stop an archdemon, no _fucking clue_ what made us capable where everyone else was doomed. I wanted to hold her, bury my head in her shoulder, and cry like I had in my earliest memories. I wanted to tell her she was the only family I had ever known and all I had been able to think since Ostagar fell was getting back to her and having her tell me everything was going to be okay.

But I’m me and she’s her. I said none of it.

“I let you out of my sight for one minute and _look_ at all this trouble,” I laughed. “Let’s get someplace safe for a shem like me and figure out this shitshow.”

“There’s no place safe for a shem like you,” she countered, pushing out of my arms and stealthily wiping the tears away from her eyes. “Who do you have with you?”

“Zevran Araini,” my elf compatriot introduced himself, springing into action. “And as many stories as Solona has told, she neglected to ever mention your beauty.”

“What the fuck, Loner,” she laughed, swatting at me. “Since when do you surround yourself with sleeze?”

Zevran had a smooth as silk reply, assuredly, but I was plucking the raven off his shoulder and setting her on the ground with a whispered admonition to “come meet my friend.”

With a flash of deep purple light and a flutter of feathers, Morrigan rose out of the form of the raven, and Opie danced back a step. It seemed to have saved Zevran a punch to the jaw.

Not that he would have minded.

“Opie. This is my friend, Morrigan. Morrigan, this is my dearest friend, Kaiopi.”

“I am honored to be introduced _to_ your friend, _as_ your friend,” Morrigan intoned solemnly.

Opie blinked repeatedly and then recovered her poise. “Kaiopi was the name I was known by in the Circle,” she corrected me softly. “I go by Ophelia, now. Opie, if you’d rather.”

“Opie it is, then,” Morrigan agreed mildly. “I am, as Solona has said, Morrigan.”

“Drinks,” Opie said, putting a hand up to silence me as I was about to make the same suggestion. “Brue can’t get himself in, but the man is a master of delivering booze.”

I threaded my fingers through hers and followed in her wake as the rest of the alienage stood silent witness in doorways and windows, Zevran and Morrigan trailing our footsteps. The only sound was my own laughter; for better or for worse, even if only for the night, I had my Opie back.

 

*

 

“You’re hungover.”

“I am no such thing.”

“You just accused me of brightening the sun to spite you. ‘Tisn’t a normal morning greeting of yours.”

She was right, of course. I was more concerned at the moment with more basic problems. Where was Opie? What time was it? How pissed was Alistair going to be?

Where the fuck were my pants?

My first question was answered as a grumpy sort of grumbling groan emerged from a pile of threadbare blankets that I had dismissed as empty. The ragged tip of a blonde braid extended from the side like a tail, but otherwise Opie was invisible in the bedding.

“What bloody time do you assholes wake up in the morning? Why?”

“Dawn,” Morrigan and I answered, simultaneously. If she was matter-of-fact and I a bit begrudging, it blended into a nice ringing sort of resignation.

Opie huddled back into the blankets with another growling sort of complaint that might have included the phrase _murderous ass clowns_. I spent a moment considering it, and decided I would keep it. Whether or not it was what she meant, I rather liked the imagery.

“If you’re quite through,” Zev’s overly perky voice sounded from somewhere above and behind me, “we have a plan to follow through on, and apologies to make.”

I turned slowly to gaze blearily at where he was perched on the landing, halfway between this story of the precariously leaning building and the next. “Plan?”

“Oh, you _are_ hungover,” Zev laughed. “Come now, I will get you back to the room Wynne has secured for us.”

“Wynne...?”

“Yes, yes, your elder mage friend.”

“I know who Wynne _is_ , you blighted twat,” I snapped back, pushing up out of the blankets that seemed reluctant to release me. “How did _Wynne_ get us a room somewhere?”

“I originally believed it was a whore house. Apparently, it is merely a shop. Pity. She knows the proprietor and was granted use of a room. Whether she confessed the true number in her party or not is anyone’s guess.”

“Great. Score one for Wynne. Where the bloody fuck are my pants?”

“I thought they fit quite nicely,” Zevran answered, moving into my line of sight to model the garment. I hated to admit it, but he was right. We were of a size. “Since you threw them at me last eve, I found it to be an open invitation. Perhaps if you meant to keep them for yourself, you would not be so quick to shed them, no?”

“So I’m going pantsless to teach me a lesson?”

“Senna Tabris, the unspeakably lovely cousin of your friend, has graciously volunteered her own clothing for your usage.”

“Did I meet Senna?”

Zevran leered at me. “No. But I assure you, she and I are well enough acquainted to make up the difference.”

Opie made another low grumbling noise. “I don’t want to hear this.”

I crawled across the floor, slapped Opie’s ass, and pushed myself to my feet. “Alright. Give me Senna’s pants, and we’ll go do... whatever it was I promised to do last night.”

“You don’t remember?” Opie asked. She had rolled over a moment too late to protect her bum, and was now peering at me above blankets pulled up to her nose.

“Nah,” I shrugged. “I’ll do it anyways, though. It can’t be worse than Harrowing myself for Arl Eamon’s son, and I agreed to do that dead sober.”

Opie’s eyes creased with a smile, although her mouth was still hidden. “I love you, Loner.”

“Love you, too, Opie. If I don’t see you again before we leave, don’t ever doubt that.”

“Never,” she whispered. I toed her gently in the side, and she squirmed away with a breath of a laugh.

“Here,” Zev said, and I turned toward him just in time to get my hand up and catch the pants he threw at me before they struck me in the face. They were in relatively good repair; a bit patched but serviceable, and about the most one could hope for out of a closed and slowly starving alienage.

“Give Senna my thanks.”

“I already included your gratitude in the note left on her pillow.”

“You’re terrible, Zev.”

“That is not what Senna said.”

“Out!” Opie demanded, sinking her head back under the blankets.

I pulled Senna’s pants on, buckled my boots on over them, and got my arms around Opie just as she rose from her bedding to hug me goodbye.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“You’re alive. You’re here. You’ve already done enough.”

“Say that when you’re getting food into the alienage again.”

“I’ll say it then, too. You better come back to hear it.”

“Done.”

 

*

 

The plan, as it turned out, was almost shamefully simple; we accomplished it on the way to the Wonders of Thedas to meet the rest of our companions.

Zevran led me through a series of interconnected buildings out of the alienage and into a part of the city that could only be described as _shady as fuck_. When we arrived at our destination, the swinging sign over the door brought back the entire half-drunken conversation the night before.

“Wait, wait, wait. Is this a _brothel?_ ” I tried to keep my voice normal, but I couldn’t help it. I dropped into a whisper at the last word.

The raven on my shoulder fluttered in a way that was undeniably laughter.

“Oh, ho! Is this your first trip into a house of ill repute, my little country mouse?”

Was I curious? Definitely a little curious. Maybe some shock and trepidation in there too. Maker’s mistress, shouldn’t I be ashamed? I did a few seconds of serious self-inspection and couldn’t find one solitary drop of shame. None. Steaming bloody void, I was _such_ a heathen.

“It _is_ ,” I confirmed, trying not to sound excited.

“My apologies, then, that we cannot stay as long as your education requires. As much as I loathe to ever repress those baser instincts, it is not safe for a wa- for one such as you in the Pearl.”

I nodded, once. Opie’s warning about the trap laid for surviving wardens was valuable enough to get me out of trouble with Alistair. Probably.

Morrigan fluttered her wings again, impatiently this time, and I nodded at Zevran to lead the way. He shouldered open the door and I entered at his heels. He led me swiftly to a smaller chamber adjacent to the tap room, where the local queen of thieves appeared to be keeping court.

She was Rivaini, scantily dressed, and lush in a way that I wasn’t used to seeing. Mages in the Circle were barely fed enough to maintain a healthy body weight. Wardens had greatly increased metabolisms and couldn’t get fat if they wanted to. And I’d just come from an alienage that was slowly starving... so this woman’s, ah, _ample_ curves were something that I couldn’t quite look away from. I hadn’t ever had any hang-ups about women – it was always men, for me – but this bitch?

Wow.

“I can’t remember the last time I saw _you_ with an innocent,” the Rivaini purred to Zevran.

“Unbelievable, I know. You are stunning as ever, Isabela. How are you liking widowhood?”

“Oh, it suits me _so_ well. Really, it’s lovely. But aren’t you supposed to be back in Antiva City?”

“You know how it goes. Business.”

“Oh?”

“We do not talk business, Isabela.”

“Since when?”

“Since right now. Can we speak elsewhere? Perhaps... privately?”

“So we’re not talking about business. You’ve got an _innocent_ with you. And you still want a private room? Alright. I want to see how this all adds up.”

She tipped her head towards a door on the wall adjacent to where we entered the room, and then stood and led us through. The chamber we found ourselves in was quite clearly a store room, if mostly empty. There were two step-stools, and Zevran gestured for Isabela and I to take them as seats.

Such the gentleman.

“Zevran, are you wearing women’s pants?”

“Ah, still fishing for secrets, are we? Isabela, my travelling companion is one of two surviving Grey Wardens in Ferelden. I trust you understand why this is a secret that must need be kept, yes?”

“Warden?” she echoed, a bit dumbly, as I felt every muscle in my body tense. I’d agreed to follow his lead, but _he_ had agreed to not out me as a Warden, _especially_ not in the Pearl. “Wise of you to come in here looking like an innocent, then. Forgive me, Warden.”

“None needed. A friend of Zev’s is not necessarily a friend of mine, but I have reason to hold high hopes for you.”

She grinned and breathed out a soft sort of laugh. “Goodness, sweet thing, no wonder he’s fallen in with you. Tell me, then: what does a Warden want with me?”

“The alienage,” I replied. “They’re starving. It is in my interests to prevent that. We’re looking for a blockade runner. I understand your talents run towards ships, rather than streets, but skills are skills.”

“And what’s in it for me?”

“If I succeed and stop this Blight before it levels Ferelden, I stand to be in a position to offer many... favors. There would be worse people to be friendly with. I cannot stay long in Denerim, not without more allies, and so I will not be in the city long enough to assist the alienage myself. If I fail? Well. Nobody makes much money in a Blight.”

She had blanched the first time I spoke of the Blight; the second usage of the word caused a notable flinch. “Easy on the b-word, kitten. There _is_ a price on your head. One so generous even I thought twice.”

Zevran nodded his agreement with a self-deprecating sort of shrug, which earned him a subtle double-take from Isabela.

“I’m not stupid enough to ask you to help with only promises and threats in exchange,” I assured her. “There is an elf there who is willing to trade in secrets.”

“Secrets?” She replied, leaning forward suddenly. “Now, then. What sorts of secrets?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Given she escaped the Circle clean, it would probably be worth your time to meet with her. She wouldn’t be nearly as intriguing if she was at all forthcoming.”

“Just sneaking into the alienage is risky,” she countered.

“Just meeting with a Warden in the Pearl is risky,” I reminded her. “It would be terrible if something were to happen to me and you were implicated.”

She went still, her eyes narrowing as she seemed to size me up. Again. “You. You, I like. Do you have a name?”

“Solona,” I answered. “Solona Amell.”

“Amell, is it? You’re a long way from Kirkwall.”

My heart skipped four beats and my stomach clenched. I stiffened my jaw and worked for a minute to relax my suddenly tight fists. Her eyes slowly widened as she watched my reaction. I rolled my neck and then shrugged. “We only ever hear rumors of our ancestry in the Circle,” I told her, as her eyebrows softened into a thoughtful sort of frown. “Perhaps I will look into a Kirkwall connection. I thank you for the tip.”

“That’s not what you wanted to say, though.”

I mutely shook my head.

“Go ahead, sweet thing. Tell me what you really think.”

I glanced over to Zev, and was reassured by his indulgent smile. I shrugged again.

“If those Chantry cocksuckers hadn’t worked so hard to break us down, I would probably work harder to stand them back up. As it is? Fuck ‘em. I’ve never had myself connected to Kirkwall before; I heard it’s a shithole.”

“One of my favorite shitholes,” she confirmed, smirking.

“Fantastic. Perhaps you will show me around town, maybe shank whatever shitlip sold me to Kinloch.”

That breathy sort of laugh came back. “Oh, absolutely.”

“So will you hop the wall into the alienage and help some people maybe not starve?”

She shrugged. “It sounds interesting. Who am I looking to meet?”

“Senna,” Zevran replied, sounding all the world like a proud father as he reached over and tousled my hair. Apparently, I’d done well by Isabela. “And her cousin, known as Opie. They are well known.”

The Rivaini nodded and then winked at me. “Let’s hope, then, that you become somebody worth knowing, sweet thing. I’ve never had a connection in the Wardens before.”

“You’d look like shit as a Hurlock,” I agreed.

She gave me a real laugh then – tipping her chin up and letting several loud, unladylike guffaws echo in the store room. “A girl does what she must to keep her figure. Come on, I’ll show you the back way out.”

 

*

 

“Where in the _bloody Void_ have you been?”

He was definitely angry.

“Can we do this someplace that isn’t the shop floor of a Tranquil’s business?” I countered. “Zev said Wynne had gotten us a room.”

He spun on his heel and stalked away. I ambled easily in his wake. He’d be happy when he heard what I’d pulled off. Keeping people from starving was the sort of thing he loved.

The room he led me to was actually a small suite, at the end of a short hallway containing exactly two other doors: one for the Tranquil proprietor of the Wonders of Thedas, and one housing the water closet and bathing chamber. He was a Tranquil, not a savage. The suite was divided by gender, with Alistair and Sten set up in the main room – with a place laid aside for Zevran – and the bedroom housing Wynne and Leliana in the absence of Morrigan and I. Bodahn and Sandal were in the market with their little cart and mule, refreshing their wares and legitimizing our presence in town. If I knew the first thing about Mervin, my mabari would be stretched out under their cart, watching everything and hoping the dwarves forgot about him so he could steal like the horrible beggar he was.

 Everyone was sitting in the front room; Leliana was perched on the window sill, Wynne sitting sedately in the simple wooden chair, and Sten cross-legged on the floor with Asala in his lap and an oiling rag.

Alistair stalked through the room into the bedroom, where the piles of blankets and bedrolls on the floor spoke to the dubious quality of the bed; if Wynne would rather sleep on the floor, the mattress was irredeemably terrible. The door slammed behind us and I knew we had as much privacy as the group could afford us. We were a ragtag pack of assholes, but at the end of the day Alistair and I were Grey Wardens and they were all sworn to follow us to whatever our end would be. If I risked that mission for some reason, none of them needed to overhear my senior Warden chewing my ass.

“You’re going to want my explanation before you get mad at me,” I said as soon as he turned and we both settled our feet into fighting position.

Rather than speak an answer, he gestured impatiently with both hands: _get on with it_.

“The man we met, Brue, told us how to get into the alienage. We got over the wall unseen because Morrigan is a master of distraction. Opie’s friend Valora found us right after we dropped into the alienage, because they were expecting an attack. She went to get Opie, and Opie came out and I got to see her again and it was amazing, Alistair. You can be mad at me forever if you want, I will regret none of it because _she’s okay_.”

I paused to breathe and saw his shoulders relax just a touch. He was still mad – probably from worry, and not wanting to be _the only one left_ because, Maker’s teats, I wouldn’t want to be alone either – but he might forgive me sooner if only because he was happy for me.

“Opie gave us a place to stay the night and explained what was happening in the alienage. Long story short, the son of the Arl of Denerim tried to sell some of her cousins into slavery to Tevinter, and Opie responded by killing some of his men. Well. A lot of his men, as it played out. Everybody the Arl sent into the alienage to bring her in got shanked or barbecued, so instead he locked down the alienage and intends to let the elves starve until they surrender Opie. And probably Valora, Senna, and Shianni, too, but I was really only interested in Opie.”

Alistair slid out of his fighting stance and slowly shifted to lean against the wall, kicking one ankle onto the other as he settled in to listen to me. Bless this responsibility-shirking, endlessly trusting man.

“We made a plan that night... or maybe it was Zev and Senna? The particulars there are hazy. Opie got me _drunk_. Anyways. The plan was really simple, because Zev has a friend in town who is, well, a pirate. So we left in the morning to find her – she was in the Pearl! I went into a brothel! I’ve only ever _read_ about whore houses! – and she agreed to meet Opie. So, hopefully, the alienage will stay locked down and the Arl’s men will leave everyone inside alone, _but_ , they’ll be getting food and supplies in from Isabela and won’t starve. Everybody wins!”

“Except Isabela,” Alistair noted.

I shrugged. “If we win, I’ll make sure something good falls her way. She is interested in connections, and we might be able to offer those in a big way. If we lose, _everybody_ loses. She seemed to agree with that being a bad thing.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, nodding his head. “So you spent the night drinking with your long-lost best friend while formulating a plan to keep the alienage from starving, and then you went to a brothel to enlist a pirate to smuggle food into the alienage and promising nothing but favors.”

I nodded. “That about sums it up.”

He closed his eyes, sighed, and switched his head movement from a nod to a slow back-and-forth shake of disbelief. “Only you. Only you would have _that story_ and have it not only be completely believable, but far less terrible than what I had dreamed up.”

“What were you thinking had happened?”

Alistair frowned. “That you ran into somebody like we did. Name of Ser Landry. Recognized me from Ostagar.”

My heart skipped into my throat and I took one unconscious step forward. “What happened? Did he report us?”

Alistair shook his head. “Leliana helped me talk our way out of it. We convinced him that regardless of what actually happened, which was completely bad, Wardens would never ally with darkspawn. And since it is agreed that darkspawn overran and killed Cailan – still very bad – there had to be more to the story than what he’d heard. He agreed to do some thinking and information gathering and get back to me.”

“Get back to you?” I echoed. “You told him how to find you?”

“Well, no. Not exactly. I said I would look him up upon our return to Denerim.”

“I can drop his name to Opie,” I mused. “She could have Senna stick a quiet knife in him and-“

“What? No! I think we can win him over. We need every knight we can get, Solona, especially if we can’t save Arl Eamon.”

“I kid!” I lied. “I only kid. And we will save Eamon. Somehow. Wynne says there’s a whole ‘nother level of healing that I’m not ready for yet. Maybe once I get better, she and I can work together and save him.”

Alistair smiled at me, the first I’d seen since the burst of relief when we’d walked through the front door. “I have no doubt you could do just that. But if anybody can find the Urn... it’s you.”

“It’s Leliana,” I countered, and he laughed. He dropped his chin and shook his head as he chuckled, and then suddenly frowned as he noticed-

“Those aren’t your pants. What happened to that fancy snoufleur stuff Bodahn found for you?”

It was my turn to laugh. “Zev’s wearing them.”

The way his face fell was as surprising as it was profound. He pushed off the wall and strode for the door. “Typical Zev. I think the only pants he hasn’t been in are mine, and not for a lack of trying.”

“Alistair.”

He didn’t answer, pushing open the door to the sitting room. “Alright, we’ve got an answer to the alienage problem. Zev, Leliana, Morrigan... can you do a sweep of the Market district for Genetivi’s house? We know it’s within a few blocks of the square. We can focus your surveillance on his house once we find it so we know what we’re walking in to.”

Three nods, and three bodies rose and left the room. Wynne was tasked with keeping the Tranquil Proprietor from disclosing who was occupying the room, and she rose quietly and left. Sten was our last line of defense in case Wynne failed, and he moved his sword maintenance into the hallway. As I’d suspected, the run-in with Ser Landry had done more to convince him about the wisdom of discretion than anything I could have said.

“Now that you’re back, you can make a space for you and Morrigan in the other room. I wanted to go through the packs with you and see if there was anything we needed to buy or sell while we were perched right above a magic shop. You and I both have some lyrium to brew, as well, and better we do it while nobody’s here to interrupt.”

“I’m not fucking Zevran,” I told him. He was right about the shopping, he was right about all the orders for surveillance in the city; he probably would have appreciated me verifying he was right, but he needed this more.

“You- what?”

I stepped into his personal space, setting the toes of my boots against his. His heart was beating loud enough for my Warden ears to pick it out of the relative quiet of the room; the thin skin at the base of his throat was fluttering at the same frantic pace.

“I am _not_ fucking Zevran.”

“You- oh. Well. I suppose that’s. Um. Well. That’s none of my, um, business, I suppose.”

“You don’t have any reason to be jealous.”

He made a sound that could have been him swallowing his tongue, if that was even possible.

“And I mean that. _You_ don’t have any reason to be jealous of anyone. _Especially_ not Zevran.” I stretched up on my tiptoes and pressed a kiss to the corner of his jaw, just below his ear. His heart stuttered, skipped, restarted. He was noticeably not breathing.

“I think we have more than enough lyrium dust to get our supplies restocked,” I continued as I fell back onto my heels and stepped away. “I’d like better labels for the bottles, since you prepare yours differently than Wynne, Morrigan, and I. I’ll make a quick stop downstairs and look at what he has for sale and figure out what he might want to buy. Good call on the reconnaissance assignments.”

“I... right. Yes. Thank you.”

I dragged my pack and Morrigan’s into the bedroom and set up our bedding on the floor – she could chance the bed if she wanted to, but I wouldn’t be to blame for it – and after a brief pause to surreptitiously catch his breath, Alistair started digging out all the materials and treasures we’d found on the road. A few minutes later we were both working and it was almost like things were back to normal.

They weren’t. They were no where near normal. We were forging a new normal.

He lifted a battered and slightly lop-sided rose out of his belt pouch, ran his fingers gently across the petals, and seemed to consider something intently for a moment before shaking himself and setting it aside with a faint blush. I didn’t try to squelch the smile that bloomed across my own face as my suspicion of his feelings seemed to be verified.

Bless his stupid face.


	29. The Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Ophelia Tabris (/Kaiopi Surana, same difference) upon the fall of Haven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part one of two

“You can’t just _leave_ ,” she said, for easily the twentieth time. The number could have been higher or lower; it was definitely in the double digits but I couldn’t really bring myself to care.

Of course, I didn't like that I’d upset Aillis; she had quickly become indispensable as a friend, and her opinion was important to me. Ultimately, though, her distress was a drop in the bucket.

He was _dead_.

Nothing had been the same since the day he’d walked out of Denerim and I’d realized, far too late, _stupidly_ , that I was in love with the idiot _shem_. And instead of admitting it and hoping he’d stay, instead of asking him to wait long enough for me to say goodbye to my family and go along with him, instead of making a _wise_ decision; I’d stood there with bed head, wrapped in a blanket, and I’d watched him walk away.

He’d written. Gradually I’d come to figure out that he’d forgotten his family and the girl who disappeared in a pillar of black smoke; everything that came before me. I didn't understand why, not at first; I couldn't ask him to explain because - obviously - he didn't remember. 

But he had been so adamant about not forgetting _me_. Even if he didn’t love me, even if he didn’t feel for me like I did for him, I was still important.

But now...? Having heard about the Herald – the _Qunari_ who had just  _appeared_ in _Haven_ of all places – I’d known whom he had been waiting for, whom he had left me to meet. There was a brief window where I’d hoped that he’d fulfilled his obligation and I’d hear from him – get that letter saying he was ready to talk, saying he’d remembered, saying his priorities could change now that he’d met his date.

But the news that came from the criers that morning shattered my illusions.

 _Haven is destroyed. The Inquisition is lost. The Elder One retaliates for the closing of the Breach_.

I’d known he loved me. I wasn’t blind, I wasn’t naive – not like that, at least. I’d felt his willpower pull at me, when he’d asked me to run away with him. I’d seen the fear and rage on his face when he’d stormed into the Vigil’s Keep to pull my ass out of Amaranthine.

But he wouldn’t say it. He wouldn’t pull away, and he wouldn’t let things be awkward, and I slept every night safe in his arms, but he wouldn’t _say_ it. I’d never been able to figure out why.

But now?

He’d forgotten the woman he’d loved rather than suffer the memory of her loss. He hadn’t wished the same pain on me. I couldn’t forget like he had, and he’d done what he could to ease my suffering. He’d known to go to Haven was to die.

 _Maker_ but this made it so much worse. He loved me, _he loved me_ , and I never told him. He loved me enough to keep me at arm’s length and save me from the pain of losing him and what I wouldn’t give for Hessarian’s sword, for the mercy stroke that would stave off this agony.

“Are you listening to me?”

“No,” I told Aillis, and she sighed and threw herself backwards onto the threadbare couch we kept in the room we shared. Eamon and Aillis originally offered to be roommates, but since he was the only man in the house we thought it fair to give him his own space.

“For fuck’s sake, Opie, _this doesn’t make any sense_. You’re smarter than this! Somebody had to have sent that message. There’s not enough time for someone outside the Inquisition to have hiked to Haven since the Breach closed. Void take it, there’s not been enough time for somebody _in_ the Inquisition to have hiked out and found a way to send word. And then for that word to be sifted down to the criers? Somebody sent the message. Somebody wants us to _think_ the Inquisition is gone. And if you bugger off into Maker-knows-where, it’ll take twice as long for you to get the news that Sera’s fine!”

“It’s not _Sera_ I’m upset about,” I snapped at her, and her face went blank for a moment.

I turned away and went back to my packing.

“He’s there? Your.... _Friend_? The one who helped you in Amaranthine, he’s in Haven?”

I nodded my head but resolutely kept my silence. There was no way I could explain this to Aillis, not without crying. I was _done_ crying in the presence of Templars. Even good ones like Aillis.

“Maker’s navel, Opie, they’re not dead. I’m _telling you_ , it doesn’t make sense for them to be dead.”

“I can’t, AIllis. I just... I can’t.”

“Opie. Please. Just listen to me-“

“I can’t hear he’s dead,” I confessed, spitting the words over my shoulder without turning around. “I can’t _sit here_ and _wait_ for the news that he’s _dead_ , alright? I can’t. I just.... I cannot.”

“But he’s _not_ ,” Aillis countered, and I tuned her out again. She didn’t know what I knew, what _he_  had known and tried to tell me. I understood what she was saying about logistics, but she had no idea about the date Twitch had kept.

I didn’t have much to pack. Twitch and Gorim had set me up pretty well when I’d fled Denerim, but even then... it was all rather self-contained. My travelling pack, my clothes, a few odds and ends. I’d grab food on the way out of the house – whatever would travel well – and besides that, all I wanted were my letters.

My letters from _Twitch_.

Maker’s Grace, he was dead.

He was dead and I never told him.

“You aren’t listening to me. Again.”

Her tone snapped my eyes up to her, but my only answer was to shake my head, _no_.

“Write him.”

“What?”

“Write him. Write Sera. If they’re dead, I’ll burn the letters. If they’re _not_ dead, they’ll _get_ the letters. Problem solved. Tell them where you went, and they’ll write you when they’ve gotten over the realization that you’re a pessimistic asshole.”

She was half right. I sighed and agreed. “Fine. I’ll write your damned letters.”

 

*

 

I followed Aillis and Eamon to the gates, made sure they were well away, before going back to the little house we’d shared with Sera and her Friends. I walked in, tossed my pack over my shoulder, pulled up my hood to cover my ears, and walked out the front door. I hid in an alley for an hour, to be sure neither of them had doubled back to follow me.

I could have taken ship to Cumberland, but that cost money and was too easily traced. While I loved my family, I didn't trust them to give me my space while I came to grips with Twitch's death. There was too much I didn’t want to hear.

Senna would yell at me for getting my heart in a twist to begin with. Mourning a dead _shem_ was unforgivable.

Kyler would want to talk about it. How do I _feel_. What am I doing for _me_. She was too soft for the truth as I intended it.

Brue had been insisting, more strongly over time, that Twitch and I were more than... whatever it was we were. Having to tell him _I’m not his widow_ was just....

It was not something I could do.

Not now. Maybe not ever, but definitely not now.

And so I walked. I was just another person on the road, with my head down and nothing to draw attention to myself. The trouble was all south – the rifts were south, the war was south, the templars and mages were collecting in the south – so the roads north were littered with refugees. Neither Orlais nor Nevarra tolerated violence on the King’s Road, even in these times, and I wasn’t the right build to be accosted by press gangs, so my going was easy.

I paid attention to my surroundings, of course. I hadn’t survived so long by being oblivious. But the days dragged into weeks and the only company I had came from my heart full of regrets.

What if I’d gone with him?

I wouldn’t have been run out of Denerim. I could have learned with him, over the years, instead of _from_ him at the end. I would have saved my family a heart attack, not to mention the stress on the alienage as Simon’s searches had become more and more insistent. And maybe I would have been able to figure out before it was too late that this date of his was going to kill him. Maybe I would have put together all the clues earlier.

The hint of the Qun on his tongue.

The mysterious arrival he was waiting for, the date in the Frostbacks.

He told people to stay out of Kirkwall, and look what happened. He told people to stay out of Haven, why hadn’t I put it together sooner?

He was travelling with mercenaries led by a Qunari. They’d seemed to be alright people, but did he know something he didn’t let on? Were they the sorts who should be led to their deaths? Did he pick the band led by the Ben’Hassrath because of who he had been or because of where he was headed?

Why, in the Maker’s blessed name, hadn’t I ever told him how I felt? Who cares if he was trying to hold me at arm’s length, _I let him_. I let him and I never questioned it and now he was-

...I could barely even think it. But there it was.

Twitch was dead.

It was the better part of a month before I found myself in the seaside city that provided Nevarra with its port. I had a single name I was working off of – a memory from impossibly long before.

The morning after my Harrowing, I was standing in Irving’s office. I was still exhausted, still swaying on my feet, but _by the Maker_ I was there. We were talking about the change in my schooling, now that I was no longer an apprentice. There were possibilities to discuss, options to mull over, and a plan to be made. There was an offer on the table that was quickly discarded, but it had tickled my fancy and fueled idle fantasies in the years since.

A necromancer in Cumberland had put his name out in certain circles as willing to take on students. The price was high and the logistics impossible and Irving had only told me about it as a courtesy, but the idea had carried with me.

Speaker Anaxas, Viuus Anaxas, was taking students.

His name was an easy one to find in Cumberland – his last name, at least. The Duke of Cumberland was Sandral Anaxas, and was the reason Viuus had a position of power in the city. Finding Viuus, himself, was a bit harder, but I was patient. I was also everything he could ever want in a student; rather than try to find a single man in a city three times the size of Denerim, I decided to make him come to me.

I climbed onto a rooftop near to the Duke’s manse and found myself a bit of shelter – Cumberland was still on the Waking Sea and the weather was fair but untrustworthy. From the spot I found, crouched behind a series of statues at the edge of the rooftop, I could look down on the patrolling guards who never would let a commoner elf into the home of the Anaxas family.

When night fell, I summoned Joy to watch over me, and descended into the Fade.

The spirits in Cumberland were unlike anything I had encountered before. Nevarran culture put an emphasis on death that twisted the boundaries of the Fade and drew in spirits from far and wide. As soon as I opened my eyes in the Fade, I was accosted by dozens of spirits.

“I wish to meet with Viuus Anaxas,” I told them, as I moved through the area. I would answer no questions, I would offer no reward. “I wish to meet with Viuus Anaxas.”

I met with desire demons almost immediately, of course, but they were too obvious in their ploys. Maker save me the first time one figured out what Twitch looked like; I worked to keep him completely out of my mind so that eventuality was delayed as long as possible.

I kept up the repetition – “I wish to meet with Viuus Anaxas” – until the horde of spirits seemed to thin. I stepped out of the Fade, back into my own mind, and blinked awake.

Joy hovered over my body, and there were still a few hours before dawn. “Wake me if aught is amiss,” I bid the little spirit, and slipped into dreamless sleep until the sun broke over the edge of the roof where I lay.

I had been awake for an hour – and Joy sent back to the Fade to rest – when an elf pulled himself onto the roof across from me.

“Viuus Anaxas wishes to meet with you,” he said, without rising from his crouch. “I was sent to fetch you, Enchanter Surana.”

I managed to keep the sigh internal – I had hoped to hide my identity, but apparently the spirits here knew me better than I had assumed. I nodded and pushed to my feet, keeping my hood up as I followed the fellow to the street level and then through a convoluted series of alleys and side-yards until we ducked into a mostly-hidden back door of a massive building.

There was a man inside – round ears, bald head, dark eyes and brows, richly dressed and appointed – who waved my escort off and gestured for me to take a seat in the same fluid motion. The elf who had led me to this place dutifully escaped, but I made no move to sit.

“Kaiopi Surana. You are over a decade late. I did not expect my invitation would be so belatedly accepted.”

“Viuus Anaxas,” I returned. “I was not given the option of accepting your invitation when first it was presented to me. I have only recently reconsidered. I will admit, the chaos in the south has colored my opinions.”

“What do you have to offer me?”

“Raw talent,” I answered with a shrug. “You know who and what I am.”

“What holds you back?”

The only thing that could draw me away was dead and buried in the ruins of Haven. “Nothing, anymore.”

“You are welcome in Nevarra,” he intoned. “The Mortalitasi take no apprentices-“

“Bullshit,” I interrupted. “You want me to summon a dead necromancer to learn from, fine. But I don’t need you to feed me any lines. You and I both know damn well you have apprentices out the nose.”

“Oh? Anything else you wish to establish before we break you of the habit of impertinence?”

“Do not call me Kaiopi Surana,” I replied. He could _try_ to break me of impertinence; I was not afraid of this _shem_.

“A more reasonable request, in this day and age. What shall I call you instead?”

There was only one name that would draw my notice faster than my own. “Willa,” I answered softly. “Willa Patrick.”

“Interesting,” he drawled. “Very well. Let us see where this arrangement might lead us.”

I nodded, and he led me from the room to begin a new life under my third name.

 

*

 

Cumberland was huge, and beautiful, and strange, and wonderful, and nothing what I expected. I was just getting used to the city – and Viuus’ arguably strange requests for things like skulls and bloodstone, both of which were so plentiful as to be almost free at the marketplace – when my past caught up to me.

“Where is she?” A voice I would know anywhere demanded from the entry hall of the Anaxas estate.

I stood up from my studies in Viuus’ library on the third floor and ran down the stairs before anything could escalate into violence.

“Opie! I know she’s here! I know she’s-“

“I’m sorry, Warden, we have no one by that-“

“I will raze this whole fucking block to the _ground_ if you don’t produce-“

“Loner!” I shouted as I approached the last landing. “For the love of the Maker, Loner, I’m fine, please! Stop!”

The steward shot me a surprised look – I had been beneath his notice for the previous weeks as I had settled in and then began taking up Viuus' busy work – which vanished as he was shoved aside by an incredibly agitated Solona Amell. She was dressed in full Warden Regalia, but at some point in the recent past she'd cut off her hair to just above her shoulders; it was done so roughly as to look unintentional - like her braid had gotten stuck in something and had to be sawed off. She had a few more lines around her eyes than I remembered, and just a touch of grey at one temple. Of course, on Solona, it looked like something she'd done intentionally, to enhance her mystique; nothing really seemed to diminish her beauty. I was also probably biased.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed. “You’re supposed to be with Twitch.”

“What am I doing here?” I countered. “What are _you_ doing here? You’re supposed to be in Amaranthine. You remember your _arling_ , don’t you?”

“May I suggest the parlor?” the Steward suggested, as he did the math and identified the Warden in his entryway. “I could have the Duke notified of your presence if you-“

“Parlor. Fine. Get my dwarf.”

“Your... what?”

“He’s across the street ready to burn the place down. Go get him and bring him into the parlor.”

The Steward managed to contain the terror that swept across his features before swinging open the door and darting out into the street. I bit back a laugh and led Solona to the parlor.

“Haven fell,” I told her.

“I heard.”

“Twitch was there.”

She blinked twice, and then caught up. “Oh, shit, Opie. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I know you were asshole over elbow in love with the boy. Did you ever-“

“No. And, please don’t. I needed... I needed a fresh start.”

“Does your family know-“

“No.”

“That was dumb.”

“Maybe.”

“So what are you-“

“You never let me have any fun,” a gruff dwarven accent cut into our conversation. “Here I thought we were launching a daring rescue.”

“Durin!” I gasped as I recognized first his voice, then his face, and then took note of his armor. “You’re a Warden now?”

“I am. Left Denerim right after you did. Your escape was the kick I needed to make my own. Thanks for that.”

“You’re... you’re welcome, I suppose. What are you two doing _here_?”

“That’s the Commander’s business. Above my pay grade,” he shrugged. “Got anything to drink?”

A servant tumbled into the room as if he'd been bodily thrown – the Steward was completely unhinged by the events of the day – and set about pouring all of us a generous goblet of wine, of a far better vintage than anything I’d been given in Nevarra thus far.

“Warden business,” Solona confirmed with a shrug. “I... _heard_... you were looking for Anaxas. Took me a bit to figure out which branch of the family this Viuus guy was in, but I got here as soon as I could. Are you safe? Do you want out of here?”

“Valor?” I asked, softly.

She nodded, once.

“He has a long range.”

“He does.”

There was so much I wanted to ask Solona about her spirit companion, but it never seemed to be the right time. Now definitely was not; I had to let it slide once again. “Viuus Anaxas is the _mortalitasi_ responsible for the nobility of Cumberland, particularly the family of the Duke. I’ve come here to study.”

“Study?” Solona echoed. “Why?”

“There is a Nightmare in Orlais,” I answered. “An old one, recently allowed to feast and now growing uncontrollably. Someone has to hunt it, and I was... not strong enough, as I was.”

“And becoming a glorified embalmer will help with that?”

I rolled my eyes. “No. But I do not intend to become a _mortalitasi_. I need information on the Fade, on the Breach, on the relationships between the two sides of the Veil, and the only place left that is safe to do that is here in Nevarra.”

“Bullshit,” Solona barked. “I would have let you study with the Wardens. Avernis must know more than any of these-“

“And I was supposed to find you how?”

Her jaw snapped shut. She stared at me for a moment and then grunted. “Yeah, okay, you got me there. But now you can! Go back to Soldier’s, and I’ll write you a letter of introduction to Avernis and you can-“

“I’m already here, Solona,” I argued. “If I run into a dead end with my studies, then yes, I will absolutely travel to Soldier’s Peak. But for now-“

“What does this Anaxas guy get out of teaching you, hrm?”

“Why don’t you two assholes let each other finish a fucking sentence?” Durin demanded.

“Miss... _Patrick_...” a new voice interrupted from the doorway, “has agreed to assist with the day-to-day duties of my station without pay, to allow me freedom to pursue... loftier goals.”

“Solona Amell, meet Viuus Anaxas,” I said, gesturing between the two of them. “He is also getting the _pleasure_ of your company, Solona, don’t sell yourself short.”

“Miss who?” She asked my teacher.

“Enchanter Surana has requested to be known as Willa Patrick while she is in Cumberland,” Viuus answered serenely.

Solona frowned at me. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“It’s more or less Twitch’s name,” I murmured.

Her eyes went wide, and she seemed to blink away tears. “Oh, no. You didn’t.”

“I didn’t what?”

“That is the most pathetic thing I have ever heard.”

“I have punched you in the fucking face before, and I will damn well do it again.”

“That’s my cue to leave, I believe,” Viuus said mildly and matched action to words.

“Screw him, this is where it gets good,” Durin countered, putting his heavily booted feet on the table and settling in to watch.

“So you got your heart broken and you’re going to hide in Nevarra, that’s the takeaway here.”

“What would you do if Alistair died?” I retorted.

“Kill everything.”

“There you go. Extreme measures.”

She shrugged. “Fair enough. Get shitfaced with me and Durin?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

 

*

“You tell me if anything goes south, you understand?” Solona said the next afternoon, after meeting with the Duke and – presumably – threatening his life. It was sort of a Solona thing to do. “You wander in the Fade like you did with Viuus and you ask for _me_. Well. You ask for Valor, and by extension, me. You got it?”

“I’m older than you,” I reminded her. “I’ve been out on my own for as long as you, but without an army of Wardens and a stack of treaties to protect me. I’ll be fine, Loner.”

“Blah, blah, fuck you,” she countered, putting a finger in my face. “If _anything goes south_ , you _tell me_.”

“I will,” I promised.

She nodded, once, sharply, and then looked at Durin and tipped her head towards the door. “If you give a letter to one of the Warden outposts in town, they’ll be able to trace me, as well, in case you have to stay out of the Fade. And you might want to look into that whole _Haven falling_ thing. Rumors say the Inquisition survived, and they are getting reestablished in some lost fortress in the Frostbacks. Sounds too much like our finding Soldier’s Peak to discount the rumor.”

I winced. It was too close to what Aillis had suggested...

“I don’t want the confirmation he didn’t make it, Loner.”

“You’d rather not know?”

“I have good reason to believe he knew he wasn’t going to survive the year.”

She froze with her hand on the door. “We’re going to have to talk about that one, at some point.”

“Yeah, well, we never talked about Valor, either. So you can do me the same favor I did you.”

“When you’re ready,” she agreed. “Hopefully I come back through here within the next five fucking years. I’ll look you up when I do, and I’m taking you with me if you’re still around.”

“Whatever you say, Loner.”

“Love you, Opie.”

“Love you too. And you, Durin.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the dwarf grumbled, waving a hand as he disappeared out the door. Loner winked at me and slipped out behind him.

I went back to the library – suddenly much better attended by the servants of the Anaxas family – and contemplated the writing desk for the rest of the day.

Did I write to Senna? Tell her where I was? She’d immediately tell me about Twitch, and I still really didn't want to hear it.

But what if I was wrong?

I wasn’t wrong, though. He’d told me he had a date to keep, in Haven, and then made everyone else promise not to go. He had held me at arms’ length, even after racing to Amaranthine in a blizzard to save me; he’d protected me from the same heartache he’d suffered when – what was her name? Cindy! – when Cindy had died. It was the only thing that made everything else make sense. He’d foreseen Kirkwall, he’d foreseen Haven, and he’d foreseen his death.

In the end, I set the writing supplies aside, and set the _thought_ aside, as well.

The Nightmare was my concern, now. If I was wrong about Twitch... well. I’d rather not consider why else he’d held me at arm’s length, if not to protect me from his death. Aillis would give him my letter and he would figure out where I was and we could go from there; I didn't need to go looking for trouble. And if I was right...? The Nightmare would most likely reunite us.


	30. Letters to Another Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Willa Patrick (/Kaiopi Surana/Ophelia Tabris/maybe she should stop running from shit)  
> Continuation from the previous chapter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part two of two

“I’m looking for Willa Patrick,” the Orlesian at the door announced.

“I’m sorry, you have the-“

“I bear a message from the Divine,” she insisted, and I heard the weak slap of folded paper on a fleshy surface. “Do not try to tell me that Most Holy has her intelligence wrong.”

“It’s alright, Emeric,” I said to the Steward as I came down the stairs. “I will speak with her.”

“Willa?” the Orlesian asked. She was difficult to make out – her hood was pulled up, and pointed almost like an Antivan Crow’s, so that it hid most of her face; beyond that she was armored in thin layers of whisper-thin leather dyed so deep a black as to seem to absorb the light. The lining , when visible, was a red so dark as to probably appear black if it were pressed against anything else.

“I have been known to answer to that name,” I answered carefully.

There was a second person behind the first – an elf in Inquisition armor, whose coloring was nothing but a dozen shades of brown. She was the most monochromatic person I had ever seen, and honestly it was a bit fascinating.

“Verial bears news under the Inquisition seal,” the Orlesian informed me. “We would both like a moment to meet with you while you peruse the contents.”

“All this for a couple letters?” I asked. It had been over a year – likely the letter was from Sera, announcing the Inquisition had won (which was old news by now) and that the Jennies had finally found me and it was past time to come home.

The Orlesian – who had close-cropped auburn hair and vivid green eyes, I could see now that I was at the bottom of the stairs – merely shrugged. “The Herald says you’re important.”

We’d gotten news of the Herald here in Nevarra, but I had done my best to tune it out. If she had lived, but Twitch had died?

...and in over a year, I had not heard from him. He was surely dead.

Fucker had  _better be_ dead.

“Very well. Come, there is solitude in the library.”

Verial and the Orlesian _shem_ followed me back up the spiral staircase to the third floor, where a small side room had been allocated for my studies. I had endeavored to do more work for Viuus Anaxas than necessary to offset the cost of my living expenses, and as such had endeared myself in some small way to the household. It was not an ideal set-up, but I was making it work.

I took the _shem_ ’s letter first, as I took a seat and waved for both of them to sit across from me. Perhaps I’d grown cocky as I aged, but it never occurred to me that I couldn’t defeat both of them easily should they mean me harm.

The letter bore an ornate stamp with actual gold leaf that I immediately believed could only have come from the Divine.

I’d met her, once. A friend of Solona’s. I couldn’t believe she would send anything but a request for information on the Warden-Commander of Ferelden.

 

 _Dear Ophelia Tabris_ ,

_I understand you use many names, but this was the one you had chosen when we met, and it seems most appropriate for me to address you as such._

_My friend, the Herald of Andraste, greatly desires to meet with you. The reasons are myriad, but in conversing with Knight-Lieutenant Aillis and Knight-Captain Eamon, I believe your personal goal in Nevarra may be more easily fulfilled with Inquisition and Chantry resources. I have sent to you my Left Hand, to be sure your travel is secured. Please consider this a formal invitation to meet with me in Val Royeaux; no strings attached._

_Divine Victoria_

_(your friend, Leliana Nightingale)_

 

I raised my eyes to the Orlesian. “Left Hand of the Divine, are you?”

She shrugged. “I’d always wanted to work for the Nightingale. She said I would take a personal interest in this journey, but to be honest I don’t recognize you or your name.”

I returned the shrug and handed her the letter from the Divine. “Here, see if this helps.”

I turned away from her and reached out to accept the letter from the Inquisition scout, Verial. As the paper landed in my hand, the Orlesian tapped out a sequence on the table that I hadn’t heard in years.

“You’re Opie,” she whispered. “Oh, shit, we finally fucking found you.”

I tried to school my reaction but my head whipped around to stare at her knuckles, still poised above the table top. She’d tapped out my call sign. After a moment of almost painful silence, she tapped out a sign I hadn’t heard before – this woman’s name was some variant of Evie, apparently – and then one I would know anywhere.

 _Will_. She’d tapped out the four-letter pattern that spelled Will. She knew Twitch.

“My boys are friend with Twitch,” she informed me as the air was sucked out of my lungs. “He tapped every Jenny in Southern Thedas to go looking for you. Nuggins is going to flip his shit when I tell him who we’re escorting back to Val Royeaux.”

As my mind reeled at her words, Verial made a soft sound of protest. “You’re not Orlesian.”

She was right. The woman – the _Left Hand of the bloody Divine_ – had dropped the accent. She was a Jenny, but definitely not from Orlais.

“I am Opie,” I confirmed, putting out my hand. “What do I call you?”

She clasped her palm to mine firmly. “Knuckles,” she answered. “I’ll give you the rest of the information on the road.”

“I have not decided whether I am-“

“It’s in your best interests, now,” Knuckles argued good-naturedly. “If you think any of us will keep this silent, you’re nuts. The secret is out, so there’s no use staying. Nuggins and Knickers owe Twitch a huge favor for keeping them out of Kirkwall and Haven, and I owe him by extension of those two keeping _me_ out of Kirkwall and Haven.”

“I thought... Twitch... was in Haven when...”

“The letter I brought,” Verial interrupted. “I feel like a third wheel in here, but this? This I know.”

I flipped the paper over in my hand to find the seal, dragged my thumb through the wax to open it, and nearly sobbed when I saw the handwriting within.

 

_Dear Willa Patrick,_

_I’m not dead, you fucking lackwit._

_If you had assumed any other name, I would think you didn’t want to hear from me, given you returned my last letter unread (with a couple of templars, no less, thanks for **that** heart attack) and left no forwarding address, **and** led your family to believe I’d pissed you off badly enough that I was dead to the whole clan and you’d cut ties with them just to be sure you didn’t have to hear from me. It’s almost as if you **wanted** me dead, and believe me I had a **great** time keeping Senna from shanking me. She sent Hank to Skyhold to fuck me up in your name. Thanks. Thanks a lot._

_We need to talk. This silence does nobody any favors. I owe you a massive explanation, and you need to write your fucking family. Sera confiscated the last letter you sent me and the shit I had to go through to get it from her... I knew you were in Nevarra as soon as I read it, but that was only a couple of months ago. But Opie... the date I was keeping wasn’t with my end. I didn’t forget what I knew because I was planning to die, I forgot what I knew so that I couldn’t break anything. It’s complicated and I don’t want to try to write it in a letter, I want to look you in the eye and explain everything to you. I need to see you._

_You shouldn’t have been put in the position to feel like you had to write me a letter goodbye. You shouldn’t have told me you loved me in a letter. And I shouldn’t tell you that I love you in a letter. So, I’ll come to Cumberland, if you want. I’ll walk away from the Chargers, if you want. You can come to Skyhold, if you want – just tell me you’re on the way and I’ll be here to meet you. We can meet on neutral ground somewhere, if you want – just tell me when and where._

_Just... give me the chance to explain, and I’ll give you the opportunity to punch me in the fucking face if you want to._

_And we both know you want to._

_Yours,_

_Twitch_

 

“That son of a bitch,” I breathed, cognizant of tears streaming down my face. “That ignorant, asshole, _idiot_ _shem_. He’s been alive all this time?”

“Yup,” Knuckles agreed, with aplomb. “Losing his mind trying to find you.”

“Don’t defend him, this is all his fault,” I countered. Maker, but I couldn’t find it in me to be mad. He was alive! And there was an explanation beyond he didn’t love me! It was probably stupid, but this _was_ Twitch we were talking about here. I was reading the letter a second time, a third, and Knuckles was saying something to Verial and I paid neither of them any mind.

He was alive and he... and he...

“I need to send some letters,” I announced to the room. “I need to sever my arrangement with Viuus Anaxas. And then, if you would like, you can secure my journey to Val Royeaux. I believe that I would very much like to renew my acquaintance with Most Holy.”

“How much time do you need?” Knuckle asked.

“All of tomorrow,” I answered. “I should be ready the morning of the day after.”

“We’ll be watching the house if you get any trouble from Anaxas,” she informed me, and then pushed to her feet. “I’ll go get shit in order. Verial, if you’d like, stay here and run her messages to the local contact when she’s done?”

“Of course, my Lady.”

When I next was aware of my surroundings, Verial had been given a room by the Steward, who was already packing up my meager belongings and had informed the Duke of my imminent departure.

So much for endearing myself to the house.

I stayed in the library for most of the night, finishing several tasks for Viuus that I had intended to accomplish over the next week. I met with Viuus briefly at his return from the House of the Dead shortly after dawn, and our arrangement ended as informally as it had begun.

We had both benefitted, but we both knew it was less than ideal, and neither of us mourned its ending.

By the middle of the afternoon, I had a substantial pile of missives for Verial to run to the various messengers who would bear them out of the city.

_Senna,_

_This is way too complicated to explain. Magic stuff, okay? Magic stuff. I’m on the move again. Leaving Cumberland, headed for Val Royeaux. I will explain more later._

_Opie_

_Hank,_

_Whatever you did to Twitch, I’m sure he deserved it. I’m headed back to Val Royeaux. I’ll be in touch when I have more information._

_Opie_

_Kyler,_

_I thought he was dead. It was easier to hide than to risk the confirmation he was gone. You understand, right? I’m going back to Val Royeaux, I’ll be in touch soon, I’m so sorry if I worried you._

_Kaiopi_

_Loner,_

_You were right. Idiot shem isn’t dead. Damn it. I’m on the move. Going to meet your song bird – she’s flown so high! – and probably punch the shem in the face. Don’t burn the place down looking for me._

_Opie_

_Twitch,_

_You’re right. I do want to punch you in the face. And I also really want that explanation. I’m being escorted by some Friends of yours, but once I get this business settled I’m coming looking for you._

_Opie_

 

Verial was particularly interested in my delivery instructions for the fourth missive, but I wasn’t about to tell some random Inquisition scout how to find Solona Amell. She left forwarding information at each place she stopped that would only send messages one more step down the line; by the time anyone unraveled it and traced her, she’d be aware she was being pursued and that was _not_ the way you wanted to meet Loner.

Once Verial had taken my messages and left, I laid down on my narrow bed in the tiny room that might have been a closet before I arrived, and I slept for the last time in Cumberland.

 

*

 

“Good morning!” Knuckles called as I came down the stairs just before dawn. “We’ve got two hours to catch the tide.”

“Ship, then,” I sighed. “I will be sure not to eat breakfast.”

“Not a sailor?” she asked as she handed my two small packs to two warriors on the stoop and then held open the front door. No one from the Anaxas family – not even the Steward – was present to see me off.

Fuck these guys, seriously.

“My only boat trip took me to Kinloch,” I answered. “Not a great memory.”

She shuddered. “I bet not.” Then she gestured at the two warriors holding my stuff. They were so similar in build and color as to pass as brothers, although one had a shield slung over one shoulder and the other seemed to be collecting one-handed weapons and dedicated to carrying as many as possible.

It ended up being a surprisingly intimidating look. I supposed that came from each weapon having seen some definite use, and the grips all having been reworked to match each other and presumably this Fereldan man’s hands.

“Nuggins,” Knuckles said, nodding to the weapon collector. “Knickers,” she introduced the other. “These two are my team. I’m sure the Nightingale has her own ideas about what my preferred tools should be, but I don’t go anywhere without these two.”

“Pleased to meet you both,” I said, trying not to be too obvious about my relief at her _team_ being two Fereldan boys. As _shems_ went, Fereldans were my favorite.

“This,” she said to them, with an obvious attempt at a dramatic presentation, “is Opie.”

It took them a moment, but then the one with the shield – Knickers – whipped around and stared at me, while the other took a couple of dancing steps back and forth between the other two. “Opie? Twitch’s Opie? No shit? Do we get to take her to Twitch? You said this was going to be good, Knuckles, but this is _fantastic_.”

“You know where we’re going,” she countered. Her tone spoke of caution but her face was openly grinning at their excitement.

“Right, right, we’ll talk later,” Nuggins agreed.

The two _shem_ men collected my things and each carried a bag in their left hands, leaving their right hands free – presumably to draw steel in my defense. Knuckles walked in front of us, wearing slightly less intimidating armor today, of the same cut and style but in swirling browns rather than pure ebon. The men walked to either side and just slightly behind me.

I was being _escorted_. It was a completely alien feeling.

When we got to the ship, Knuckles and Nuggins climbed the gangway while Knickers stood at the bottom; Knuckles disappeared and Nuggins remained at the edge of the deck, so that I had an armed guard at either end of the plank. I hesitated, only starting towards the ship at Nuggins’ grinning encouragement. Knickers raced up behind me, and stayed at my back as I followed Nuggins across the deck.

I knew almost nothing about ships, but this one was the largest I had ever seen, and its pinions and sails were all emblazoned with the symbols of the Chantry. Sailors were stopping and standing at attention as we passed, and I was quickly becoming completely unnerved by the entire experience.

When Nuggins held open the door for me, I paused in spite of myself. He must have seen my discomfort. The grin faded from his face, replaced with a more reassuring sort of smile.

“It’s a different world now,” he said, tilting his head towards the hallway beyond the door. “The Divine is changing the way mages are treated. You are an honored guest, here.”

“I’m an elf,” I countered, softly.

“We can’t make up for the rest of the world,” Knickers said from just over my shoulder. “But while you’re with us, you’re a Lady, and Maker save the man who doesn’t treat you appropriately.”

Nuggins nodded sagely. I hesitated a moment longer, but Knuckles’ voice called from down the hallway. “If we wanted you dead, we wouldn’t have bothered with the fucking boat. We’re all Friends, remember? Get the fuck in here.”

Ah, right. Jennies. I coughed a laugh and went looking for the Left Hand of the Divine.

She was sitting at a table in a brightly lit cabin, looking over what seemed to be a contract with the ship’s Captain. She was Rivaini, with an absurdly large hat and very little clothing beyond.

I would have recognized her anywhere.

 “Fancy meeting you here, little mageling.”

“Nope,” I said and turned on my heel. “Not happening. I’ll walk.”

“You know each other?” Knuckles asked, surprised.

“Ophelia, come back, there’s no hard feelings. Really, you did me a favor with the Aevarin thing, in the end.”

I walked to the door and rested my hand on the handle and considered – long and hard – exactly how much I was willing to put up with and how long this trip would be.

“Look,” she continued, “I’m making a _lot_ of money from the Chantry by transporting you to Val Royeaux. Can you at least trust that?”

“Yes,” I sighed, and turned back into the room.

“I was going to introduce you to Opie, Isabela, but I suppose that’s unnecessary,” Knuckles observed.

“Oh, no, we are _well_ acquainted,” the ruthlessly mercenary, self-titled pirate queen cooed. “In fact, we’re practically family.”

“How do you figure?” I asked, as I sat down in the third chair at the Rivaini’s table.

“Your best friend is Solona Amell, and my best friend is Garrett Hawke,” she replied smoothly.

“And?”

“His mother was an Amell. They’re second cousins. See? Family.”

All I could do was shake my head. “I actually can’t argue with that. That might be a better failsafe than money, with you.”

“Maybe,” Isabela agreed. “But family _and_ money? You’re as protected as they come.”

“I want this story,” Knuckles chimed in.

“Only three days at sea,” Isabela said with a shrug. “Not enough time to do it any justice.” She sat forward to address me a bit more directly. “Look, little mageling, mistakes were made. Our history is just that- history. You’ve got two nights on my ship, and then you’re free of me again. Until then, you’ve got the nicest single cabin to yourself, right next door to the trouble triplets here. This charter was signed for by the Inquisitor, the Herald, _and_ Most Holy – my boys know we’re already delivering you to the highest bidder. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve told them how many sails of mine you’ve ruined, and Nuggins is out spreading the story of your escape from Amaranthine as we speak. I don’t care if you like me; you’re as safe on my ship as have ever been in your life.”

It was hard to reach any conclusion from that speech beyond that Isabela had been changed by her time in Kirkwall. She’d deny it to the end, of course; it was reassuring nonetheless. “Thank you, Isabela. I will try to stay out of the way as much as possible. May I be shown to my room?”

“That’s it?” Knuckles asked, and then waved at a sideboard I hadn’t paid much mind to when I’d entered the room. It was covered with fine foods, many of which I didn’t have a name for. “Stay! Have a glass of wine! Sit! Enjoy some company!”

How do you explain to someone that you’ve never been in their world, and you’re not comfortable with pretending? I struggled for a moment for some way to sidestep Knuckles’ invitation, but – surprisingly – Isabela interceded.

“You said this was her first sea voyage, Ev, don’t foist food on her until we know how her stomach is going to sit.” She gestured to the door I’d entered through. “Back into the hall, bear left, first door on your right. You’re in the middle cabin; I’m aft and Trouble is stern. Please don’t light my ship on fire.”

“I make no promises,” I replied and made my way out of the room.

The cabin I let myself into had three generous windows running along the side, with a broader-than-expected bed bolted on one interior wall and a cleverly designed desk on the other. My two packs were laying atop a foot locker, unopened and seemingly no worse for wear.

It was more space than I had ever had to myself in my whole life; even the room I’d planned to share with Solona after her Harrowing was smaller than this.

It was too much. I was just an alienage rat from Denerim, just some mageling who’d gotten lucky and fled from Kinloch before chaos broke loose. Even if I wasn’t prone to seasickness – and at this point I had no idea – the salted meats and fine cheeses and exotic fruits on Isabela’s sideboard were too rich for my pallet.  Some bread, some water, maybe a little wine; anything beyond that was a luxury.

I sat at the desk, determined to make what use of the sunlight streaming through the windows as I could. I uncapped the ink that was cleverly sunk into the desktop and started the first of several lists.

 _What the fuck was Twitch thinking_ was the title of the first page, and I wrote down every theory I could imagine as to why he’d acted the way he did. There was still the possibility he was from the future, which had been Hank’s favorite mental exercise to revisit in quiet moments. The more I thought about it, the less crazy that one became.

Those thoughts carried me through the first day at sea; the weather was clear and the seas calm, and I was able to mostly ignore the sounds of the sailors and the incessant movement of the ship. A light knock at my door just as the sky grew too dark to comfortably write drew me from my desk at twilight.

One of Knuckles’ _shemlen_ warriors was standing in the hallway with a tray. He only a had a shortsword at his hip, so for a moment I was at a loss as to which one it was.

“Knickers,” he supplied helpfully, before I could ask. “Ev said you could go for some food, and Morty thought you’d prefer something simpler than the shit Isabela eats.”

“I would, thank you,” I said, and motioned for him to come in. He quickly set the tray on the desk – it looked to be a bowl of soup consisting mostly of root vegetables and a thick slice of bread – and then moved to leave once more.

“Ev would be Knuckles,” I said, and he halted in his tracks. “And Morty is Nuggins. Do you have another name?”

“I’m Karl, ma’am. Karl Glennon. Morty Higgins is Nuggins’ right name. You’ll hear Knuckles’ name soon enough in Val Royeaux, but Ev is short for Evelyn Trevelyan.”

“And you were Twitch’s Friends in Highever, you and Morty?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I... I really don’t think you need to call me _ma’am_ , Karl. I’m just another Friend.”

“If I can ask, and since we’re swapping name... is Opie short for anything?”

I opened my mouth to answer – and stopped. “I don’t rightly know, anymore. I’ve had too many names, I think. My mother named me Kaiopi, and my sister couldn’t pronounce it so I became Opie in my family. I changed it to Ophelia when Solona helped me get out of Kinloch-“

“Solona _Amell_?” he interrupted. “The Hero of Ferelden?”

I had to laugh. He was so _earnest_. He reminded me so much of Aillis – a willingness to learn, and a refusal to be limited by race or standing – that I couldn’t help but be put at ease. “Yes, that Solona Amell. We grew up together, in the Circle. She was my very best friend, long before she became a Warden and saved the world.”

Karl whistled thinly through his teeth. “Do you think that’s why the Seeress has been looking for you?”

“Say what now?”

He looked around a bit uncomfortably for a moment, and then took two steps and pounded quickly on the wall. I heard footsteps in the hallway and then the second of Knuckles’ _shemlen_ warriors popped through the door.

“Are we talking? Can I join?”

I laughed again and gestured widely at the room. “Make yourselves at home!”

Morty bounded into the room and Karl shut the door while I sat at the desk and made a real effort at eating the soup I’d been brought. In another time I would have worried it was poisoned – magebane would be particularly terrible while trapped in a ship at sea – but the names they’d given me were the same ones Twitch had told me to watch out for, all those years ago. If this was a trap, they’d earned their kill.

“So,” I asked, as I blew on the soup, “who is this Seeress and why is she looking for me?”

“She’s the Herald of Andraste,” Morty supplied, from where he sat beside Karl on the foot locker. “And she’s-“

“Now, I thought that was the Inquisitor,” I interrupted.

They both shook their heads. “At first, yeah. But then the _real_ Herald fell out of the sky, right before Haven fell.”

“Fell... out of the sky?”

They both nodded. Karl jumped in before Morty could speak, and I gave up trying to keep track of who said what. They were like two sides of the same coin. “Like a rift, but not. It took a few days to wake up, and then she _knew_ things, things she couldn’t possibly know, and inside the Inquisition they started calling her a Seeress.”

“And you know this how?”

“Twitch wrote us, looking for you, and it came up,” one of them said, while the other added, “and we work for Knuckles who works for the Chantry so it was important we got the real story.”

“And Twitch-“ Maker save me, my voice still caught on his name “-knew this from working in the Inquisition? It was common knowledge there?”

“No,” they said together. While one laughed, the other added, “he and the Seeress are from the same world.”

I dropped my spoon with a clatter and looked over my shoulder at them. Karl looked abashed while Morty seemed positively gleeful.

“The same _what_?”

Karl shrugged as Morty explained, “Their world ended. Some big catastrophe. Andraste brought a bunch of the people from that world to this one, either to help with things here or just as refugees. At least, that’s what the Divine told Knuckles.”

My list from earlier was junk. Absolute garbage. I’d joked with him about being on a mission from the Maker, but I hadn’t actually thought that was _real_. And his letter said he’d forgotten everything so he couldn’t _break anything_ , and he’d known about Kirkwall and Haven...?

The possible connections made my head spin. It was ludicrous – Andraste sending over refugees from another world – but it fit so well with everything he had said that I couldn’t help but accept it.

“Told you she didn’t know.”

“Fuck you, man, Ev gave it a fifty-fifty shot.”

“Okay, wait. Just stop. Wait,” I pushed aside my soup and turned completely around to face them. “Let’s assume what you’re saying about other worlds is the truth. What on _earth_ does that have to do with me?”

“The Herald has a list of names,” Karl said, looking me dead in the eye. “And you’re on it.”

“Why?”

“We didn’t actually get that one answered,” Morty answered with a shrug. “We needed to know about the other world and how to tell someone might be from there or might have met or hurt someone from there. Used Twitch as an example, since we both knew him already, and it made sense.”

“What sort of list is this? Am I in trouble? Who else is on it?”

“Solona Amell,” Karl answered. “Durin Aeducan,” Morty chimed in. They started alternating names. “Edric Cadash.” “Rian Brosca.” “Finn Cousland.” “Evelyn Trevelyan.” “Elentari Lavellan.”

“And you,” Morty finished. “Kaiopi Surana. Unless we’re gravely mistaken, but I’m pretty sure that’s what Knuckles said.”

“No... that’s the name I was born with,” I confessed. “And I know many of those people. It’s very distinguished company.”

They both nodded. “Thus the big fucking boat,” Morty remarked.

Karl snorted and I couldn’t help but laugh again. “A valid point.”

“Look, you need to eat your soup and get some rest and whatever. Just... if you need anything, one of us will be awake all night. Just thump on the wall, like I did to get Morty in here.”

“I will, thank you.”

They nodded again and let themselves out.

They’d given me a lot to think about. I ran through the names, the _other world_ theory, and every implication of both that I could think of; it carried me through the rest of my dinner until I laid down to sleep, and immediately greeted me again in the morning.

Karl and Morty appeared sporadically through the next day, bringing small amounts of relatively bland food or inviting me to look at something particularly interesting on the coast. I kept to my room, however, allowing myself to feel completely overwhelmed at the change that had overtaken my life. I began and abandoned several more lists, all of them some variant of _what the fuck do I say to Twitch._ Eventually I abandoned the desk and sat, cross-legged on the bed, and gave myself permission to be utterly lost in thought.

I was on my way to meet the Divine, which was a huge deal on one hand – I was an elf and a mage and a Friend of Red Jenny – and utterly anticlimactic on the other, since I’d met her ten years before as a part of Solona’s Blight Busting Brigade, as Alistair had called it. I couldn’t really consider what would happen after; it was too dependent upon what Most Holy wanted with me. Would she outfit me and send me off to battle the nightmare? Would she send me to the Inquisition? The idea that she was only sending for me because Twitch was looking for me was flattering but wholly unlikely; far more reasonable was this Seeress had need of me, or that someone wanted to use me to find Solona.

Which would, actually, work. I could find her, and I could more or less guarantee she would come at my summons. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the Nightingale would need _me_ to find Solona, though, now that she had the full power of the Sunburst Throne at her disposal.

I let my mind run in circles for the rest of the trip, which ultimately wasn’t near long enough for the impact it had on my life. A week or three would have been better, in terms of time needed to come to grips with the loop I’d been thrown for.

Captain Isabela – she insisted she was an Admiral now, and I wasn’t buying it – brought us safely to port in Val Royeaux a few hours after midday, and after two mostly sleepless nights I was happy to be back ashore. There was no one waiting for us on the dock, but given my company I didn’t precise need it.

As before, Knickers and Nuggins paced along just behind me and to either side, while Knuckles took point. Our bags were all sent up on porters wearing the livery of the Grand Cathedral, with my two being lumped in with Knuckles’ things to discourage snooping. The Nightingale had brought a degree of fear to the title of Left Hand that Knuckles seemed dedicated to maintaining; she assured me no one would snoop in her bags twice, assuming they survived the first attempt.

We entered the Grand Cathedral without aplomb, through one of the many side-doors for staff and clergy that led immediately into a veritable maze of hallways and chambers. Nuggins slipped in front of me, so I had a warrior before and behind as we made our way quickly through the narrow passages. I realized after a moment that Knuckles had disappeared; although I was fairly certain she was still at point, she was invisible for as far as I could tell.

We started going upward at some point, and while I did my best to at least keep track of altitude, I knew I would need several trips through these hallways before I had any idea how they were strung together. We were four stories above where we’d entered when suddenly Knuckles was standing in a doorway and waving us through. “We’re expected,” she said, clapping Knickers on the shoulder and securing the door behind us.

The room we entered was warmly appointed, with seven other closed doors beyond the one we’d entered through. It was long and narrow, with a door at each end and three on either side, and no furniture to speak of. The rugs were thick, though, and a series of crystal-and-iron chandeliers hung from the ceiling to illuminate the rich tapestries depicting the on the walls. Each one was a finely woven panel displaying the Chantry sunburst, but the lack of variation was made up for with superb craftsmanship.

I’d never had the opportunity to consider what sort of decor might suit me, but I immediately decided that _simple but finely made_ would serve nicely.

Knickers and Nuggins positioned themselves to either side of the far door, hands to hilts and backs to the wall. Knuckles tapped me on the shoulder and nodded towards the door before stepping in front of me to lead the way.

She tweaked the noses of her two warriors – they seemed to see it coming – and then pushed open the door.

“Oh, Ev, good,” I heard a woman’s voice greet her. “You have excellent timing, as always.”

“Most Holy,” Knuckles replied warmly. I took a breath and paced to the door and paused in the open doorway.

The room was square, with one other door on the opposite side from where we entered and a bank of windows on one wall. Long sideboards stood to either side of both doors, and the corners without windows both bore stewards standing at the ready. The room contained a long oval table with a notch cut at one end, and six chairs on either side. A chair designed to recall the Sunburst Throne sat in the notch of the table, containing none other than Divine Victoria.

A man stood directly behind and slightly to the right of the Divine, and while I was sure I’d never seen him before, he was unspeakably familiar. Who did he remind me of? He was Templar-trained, for sure; the stamp was heavy on him and he made no move to dissemble. His armor, though, was strictly the emblems of the Chantry. The Right Hand, perhaps?

There were four people seated around the table; three women facing me and a man with his back to me. Closest to the Divine was a woman in all white, as short as an elf, with bright brown eyes and a hint of brown hair under her cowl. Her smile was warm as she looked at me, and I could have sworn the whites of her eyes flashed blue. She didn’t _feel_ like a mage but given whom she sat next to, it was entirely possible her aura was masked.

Beside the little _shem_ was a woman who could only be the Inquisitor. She was Vashoth, dressed impeccably, with the Fade whirling so strongly around her as to be nearly palpable. She was bonded with Wisdom; I could almost see the spirit’s face transposed over her own. Her violet eyes seemed determined to bore through me, but after a lifetime with Solona there was little that could intimidate me anymore.

On the other side of the Vashoth was another woman, this one clearly Antivan. She, too, was richly dressed, although in cloth-of-gold rather than Inquisition-branded leathers. Not that I should expect anything different; surely I was the only person to ever be invited into the Divine’s council chamber and come dressed as a pauper. The Antivan had a quill poised at the ready, and seemed to have been taking notes on the meeting.

The fourth person at the table turned to look at me, and my heart stopped.

“Kaiopi?” the Templar Cullen Rutherford asked, his tone a lesson in disbelief. He pushed up from the table to step toward me and, to my object horror, bow. “Enchanter Surana, I had no idea you had survived the Blight, much less that you were one of the people Gwen sought. Welcome to Val Royeaux.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exhausted tonight as I post this. Apologies in advance for any typos or other weirdness; I know there's at least one other paragraph I meant to change but I just don't have the brainpower to find it. Give me a shout if anything looks wrong.


	31. To Redcliffe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POV: Hellen Adaar, set between Ch 22 and Ch 23 of "Keep to the Stars"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was an exercise meant to get myself back into Hellen's voice, particularly in regards to Gwen. I liked it enough to share.

“We’re going back to Redcliffe,” he said, pushing through the door to my bedroom at the ass-crack of dawn.

I’d woken up confused and alone in the war room an hour before, Cullen’s chair empty – _Gwen gone_ – and Solas missing. The elf and I had wandered, briefly, the ruins of Haven and I had my first true lessons in walking the Fade. I wasn’t sure if I was eager for more.

Not that it mattered. I immediately went looking for Gwen. Cullen had been yet awake, staring red-eyed at a ledger, quill long gone dry hovering aimlessly above it.

“Dorian has her,” he said in lieu of greeting, glancing up as I shouldered through his door. “She was awake, the entire time. Heard our conversation, I’m sure. I... said something foolish, and she... she started to cry. Dorian scooped her up and left. I believe he took her back to her own room, hopefully to actually sleep.”

“If what you said brought her to tears,” I countered, already backing out the door again, “then it was the opposite of foolish. It was precisely what she needed.”

The door had swung mostly closed between us before I heard his voice faintly call, “Thank you, Inquisitor.”

Rather than go looking for Gwen and Dorian – there was nothing I could say or do that Dorian couldn’t – I went straight up to my own quarters.

I was there barely long enough to get out my travel pack before Dorian strode into the room without knocking. It couldn’t be said to be uninvited – Dorian was always welcome.

“Yes,” I agreed easily, having already been half packed. “I’m leaving as soon as possible.”

“Not you, ass. We. I’m coming with you.”

There were half a dozen wiseass replies I could make. Shouldn’t he stay here, and mind Gwen? Perhaps he might ask, rather than demand? Who died and made him King? I could have opted instead to say something calm and reasonable... but where was the fun in that?

“Oh? Are you packed yet?”

He paused, and then slowly turned back towards the stairs. “How much time do I have?”

He had just taken care of Gwen. I should probably be nice. “Is Gwen asleep?”

“Yes.”

That earned him some kindness. “I’ll come to your room and collect you on my way to the door.”

With a nod, Dorian turned and fled back down the stairs. I didn’t have to pack much – we were going to Redcliffe, not some ass-end of Orlais – and anything I didn’t have on hand I could easily pick up when we got there. My coin was as good in the Crossroads and Redcliffe village as it was in Skyhold.

I tucked a change of underclothes into the bag, made sure I had all the appropriate pieces of my armor on, and then snuffed the candles with a breath of mana, the way Dorian had taught me. Clever Tevinter bastard. The room was dark when I pulled the door closed and started the long trip down the stairs.

Cassandra was waiting for me at the bottom.

“Did you see?” I asked her.

“I did not. I heard. It was not difficult to guess what your next move might be.”

“Who told you?”

“Leliana. She was witness to the entire memory. She was... disturbed... and required someone outside the grasp of the image to discuss what she had seen.”

There was a thought. If Leliana had seen everything, that meant the memory had made it up to the top of the tower. What was the shape of its area of effect? Was the main hall involved? Was it a dome, moving up, or was it a sphere that included the levels below us?

And, perhaps more importantly, how fucked up was Leliana, now that the real story of how Gwen came to join us had been forcibly implanted in her mind?

“I’m going to Redcliffe to try to find that bag.”

“For you or for Gwen?”

“Why not both?”

She smiled, then; the thin-lipped expression of approval that I got when I did exactly what she expected. “I would like to join you. It would be... good for me, to see the evidence of this recovered memory for myself. It would help me to reconcile the spirit of the Divine we met in the Fade.”

“Are you packed?”

“I am always packed.”

“I’m going to go collect Dorian, and then I will meet you at Dennett’s.”

She nodded, and then fell into step beside me as I crossed the hall. I turned to enter the garden, where Dorian had taken a small room as _ambassador from Tevinter_ , which I was mostly sure was a completely made-up title. Cassandra turned to the left, taking the side-exit via the rotunda over the bailey wall into Cullen’s office. Her personal rooms were near the armory, but knowing Cassandra she had already put her baggage at the stable.

Cole was waiting for me outside Dorian’s door, his own pack slung over his shoulder.

“I’m coming,” he said softly.

It was not a request.

Given his own weird history and his strong bond with Gwen, I had no qualms with him coming along. If anything, someone who might be able to help me explain all this Fade shit would be handy.

Of course, he knew that.

“Stable. Cassandra. Soon.”

I nodded, but he was already gone.

I raised my fist to knock on Dorian’s door just as the Tevene opened it. I nearly rapped my knuckles across his forehead. He went cross-eyed for a moment as he scowled at my hand and quirked an eyebrow at me. “You said something?”

“Cole was here waiting for me. He asked to come too. Are you ready to go?”

“Just about.” He swept back into the room, and I briefly lost track of him in the darkness; he’d either been packing without his candles lit or he’d snuffed them when he heard me at the door. He appeared a moment later with his pack over his shoulder. “Lead on, Hellen.”

“Meet me down at the stable,” I said, with a sweep of my chin in that direction. “I’ve got one more stop to make, and it’ll take a minute to get our horses roused.”

“See you at the gate, then,” he agreed, and set off.

I went back into the main hall and ascended the stairs to the loft where Vivienne held court.

She was present, and awake. Her rooms were above Dorian’s, facing the garden, and not much bigger than the Tevene’s. Given her extra space on the loft, the other room was more for privacy and clothing storage than actual living quarters.

“Is no one sleeping tonight?” I asked rhetorically once she bid me a soft hello.

“I fear few who had Gwendolyn’s horror thrust upon them is having a restful slumber,” she countered.

“Where were you?”

“The library, with Fiona. The former Warden and I may disagree on nearly every point of politics, but she is a font of wisdom one would be foolish to disdain. I am not a fool.”

There was so much meaning in that statement that I was almost side-tracked into pursuing a much longer conversation than the one I had planned. Vivienne was likely asking Fiona about the logistics of the Orlesian Wardens’ false calling. The idea hadn’t occurred to me, and now that the possibility for answers from a metamagical standpoint existed, I was desperately curious.

That was not why I had sought out Vivienne, though.

“What was it about Gwen’s memory that keeps you awake?”

Vivienne’s eyes fluttered closed, and I did not expect an answer. She generally surprised me, though, and tonight was no different.

“It is common knowledge in the Court that I am the consort of the Duke of Ghislain. Bastien. He has been... ill. For a great deal of time. I have, until now, been focused on finding a cure for his ailment. Gwen’s memory has forced me to consider the possibility I might not succeed... and the impact that failure might have. It is not a comfortable line of thought.”

“I am so sorry, Vivienne. I had no idea. Is there anything I might do to assist you? Perhaps, together, we might find success.”

“That is quite kind of you, my dear. Thank you. I am pursuing a lead and am yet hopeful of its eventual success. I will not hesitate to take you up on your offer if it seems efficacious.”

I nodded, and waited a beat. There was no easy way to ask the question that had brought me to Vivienne. “I am leaving, Vivienne; Cassandra is waiting for me at the stable with Dorian and Cole. I can not delay this errand. I am aware that I am taking with me the two people besides myself who are most likely to be of assistance to Gwen in the days ahead. I know you have had little reason to cross paths in the past, but I know of no one with the history and wisdom to help her more than you. Will you care for her in my absence?”

Vivienne’s eyes widened briefly. “Do you believe she would welcome my assistance?”

“I believe she is at the bottom of a well, and is wise enough to grasp any rope that is thrown to her.”

Vivienne breathed a bit of a laugh and then nodded. “Very well. As a favor to you, my dear, if nothing else, I will look after the Lady Gwen.”

“I appreciate this, Vivienne. Please allow me the opportunity to repay the favor.”

“Josephine is teaching you well, my dear. We can speak more when you return.”

I excused myself in a hurry and left via the same route Cassandra had taken.

Solas was awake, working on the addition to his mural from Adamant.

“No one sleeps tonight,” he said, as if to himself.

“I fear I may not sleep for days,” I replied.

“You are not alone in that fear,” he told me as I slid out of his antechamber and onto the bailey wall. “We have all had our frames of references adjusted.”

Cullen was still sitting at his desk, though now his head was in his hands and he stared blankly at the ledger open before him. The quill sat on the desk as if dropped; the ink was dried on the nub and it was likely ruined. He didn’t look up when I entered his office.

“I’m leaving. Right the fuck now. I’m taking Cassandra, Cole, and Dorian with me. We’re going to Redcliffe castle, hopefully making a quick pick up, and then coming straight back. I hope to only be gone three days; we’ll hurry.”

“A quick pick up?” he repeated, flatly.

“I might be able to verify Gwen’s memory. No promises. Three days, okay? Four at worst. If it’s going to be longer I’ll send a raven.”

He nodded, and I exited out the south door; there was a high likelihood he wouldn’t remember anything I’d just said. If he was worried about it, Leliana would be able to figure out where I’d gone and why.

My team was waiting at the gates, my horse saddled and ready. I swung my pack over his withers, tightened the straps to the back of the saddle, and then heaved myself onto his back. We were out the gate, clattering down the causeway before the first hints of false dawn touched the tops of the towers.

I was aware that I was setting aside far more important things for this errand. Adamant needed to get pulled down. We had preparations to make for the ball at Halamshiral. There was a civil war to calm in the Dales and red lyrium streaming out of Orlais.

But Gwen screams drove me onward.

Whatever had happened to her world was important. _She_ was critically important. That blue bag felt like the key, the proof, the center of the entire problem. If I could get that, I could prove to myself – to her – to the whole fucking Inquisition – that this world, this life, this problem was real. _This_ was where she needed to be. _This_ was her world, now. _This_ was what needed her full attention.

Not the dead husband she mourned. Not the world and the family she’d left behind.

I could never say it to her; not like that.

But handing her the bag would make the same point.


End file.
